Future Termination: The Forgotten Past
by nurzubesuch
Summary: When Doc Brown returns to 2018 he finds things completely different than expected. And though this future is much brighter than the one he once saw, he knows that it's not supposed to be that way ... and that the war with the machines is inevitable. REMASTERED AND BACK IN PRODUCTION
1. Back In The Future

**Disclaimer: I own nothing of this**

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><p><strong>Back In The Future<strong>

Thursday

October 21

2018

The DeLorean broke the time barrier with a big triple blast. Everything in the street lighter than a box full of bricks got blown away, to find its destiny somewhere else. Doc hit the brakes and finally the car slowed down. After the bright light of the time barrier his eyes were blind, red and blue dots dancing before him. Everything seemed very much dark on the other side of the windshield. Reasonably he didn´t expect to see any lights anyway.

The time circuits were set on the date October 21, 2018. One day after he´d left this time period last time he´d been here. That was now over thirty years ago, from his point of view. It would be interesting to see the same place and the same people again, knowing that nothing had changed for them in all these years since their last meeting. Years that had changed so much for him.

At least he would be able to tell them that he succeeded in his mission. The promise he gave. He had found a way to keep it. It was always an gift in itself to make a gift to someone else. Especially a gift like that. John Connor and his friends would share his view, that was for sure. It would enable them to finally fight their war at the place and the time it belonged. The present. Their present.

Doc was no philosopher but he knew one thing without any doubt. You couldn´t change things by changing the past and you couldn´t win a fight in the past. You could only fight your battle in the here and now. Time traveling was not to change things. It was just to uncover things. To explore. To learn. At least that´s what he´d told Connor last time.

Though, it would be interesting to see them again. Maybe it was not possible to change things in the past, but he obviously had found a way to change things for the future. Just a little cheating but Doc figured it would be all right. It wasn´t the first time he decided a little cheat on time and fate wouldn´t hurt. Though he took this decision with a little help, he took it by his own free will. And it was good that he did. He lived and could go on with his own mission through time. A mission that would be accomplished very soon with a little luck.

It was a shame. After all Doc invented the time machine to discover the future. To find out the future of mankind was as dark as it was, had been a shock. He was able to see the future only to learn it lay in ruins.

Fortunately he knew that there was hope, even in this hell. John Connor and his resistance would beat the machines one day. Doc believed that without any doubt. He believed in the strength of mankind. Humans wouldn´t go down so easily. Just like in H.G. Wells´ War of the Worlds. Doc read it as a kid and still believed it could be true. Though he never believed to see that war with his own eyes.

But he did. Thirty years ago he got a short glance at it and now he returned to exactly that time. He was an old man now. 63 years. What an age to finally experience an adventure like that. But better later than never. Not that he wasn´t used to wait after all. And for what he´d waited.

He waited for the possibilities to start with his work on the time machine. He waited for the day he would meet Marty for the first time. Great Scott, what a day it had been. Seeing Marty as a fourteen year old after he´d known him as a seventeen year old almost grown up, was a real tough thing.

But was that weirder than suddenly seeing his little neighbor, a once five year old girl, as an old woman? The difference between them was much bigger.

At least this time there were no differences to be expected.

Doc´s idea of time travel did never consider things like that. He thought on differences in the environment, the buildings the manners and customs of society. But not about people he knew. He´d never though about that. And then Marty had seriously asked him to look him up after arriving the future. Obviously the kid wondered where he would be in this future T had told them about.

Maybe Doc underestimated him. Maybe he was not too young for the truth. Perhaps he could tell him what he already knew about the future without disturbing him. The kid was tough. He would be able to stand it once when he would tell him.

Thinking that warmed his heart and broke it the same time. But that was something Doc would consider on a later occasion. Now he had to focus.

He reached down to switch off his headlights, just in case. Though J.J. did say, the machines were not very interested in Hill Valley, but you never knew. Safety first. He would have to find his way in this strange area, even though he remembered it to look very irritating. Recognizing familiar streets had been tough back then. When you saw merely ruins and not the buildings you used to know.

But he believed he could find the house again. Jessie´s house. He would use the time portal J.J. constructed and he would go to Los Angeles. To John Connor´s headquarter. Like he´d done it with T 30 years ago. Yesterday. It was funny.

His hand touched the switch to turn off the headlights, and that was the moment he noticed it. There _was_ light outside. Electric light. Lamps. The street wasn´t dark and abandoned like he remembered it. Now that his eyes got adapted, he could see it pretty clear.

There were parked cars in perfect shape and a long line of lamps illuminating the street. Great Scott! How was that possible? The houses were no ruins like they should be in this time period. They were perfect and in some windows there was even light on. People!

Doc was shocked. He checked his time circuits again. Perhaps he made a mistake or perhaps there was a malfunction that brought him to another target than he actually planned. In that case he would have to reload the plutonium reactor and do another trip. That would be very unpleasant. He hated waste of energy. But there was no malfunction. The year was correct. October 21 2018, 04:35 a.m.

But he didn´t even need to see his instruments. He just had to look out. The cars were not the types he knew from his time in the year 1985. The looked completely different, almost like rockets on wheels. Even the street lamps were different. High tech versions from the lamps he was used to see along the streets. There was no doubt. This was the future.

But that was impossible. There should have been a nuclear war years ago. The human race should fight evil machines to survive and hide between ruins. Why were there no ruins? While for every other person this discovery would be a happy one, Doc could only feel dread and the deepest worry. This wasn´t good. This was so not good.

John Connor, T, Jessie … they all had told him that however horrible that future might be, it was absolutely necessary to occur. Every disturbance in that already very unstable and sensitive timeline would cause an unimaginable disaster for both future and past. And since his own life and Marty´s depended on that undisturbed timeline, Doc was very concerned about this new development.

He passed a building that looked like a bank and saw a digital clock outside. It changed from daytime to weather to stock index. Finally it showed the date. October 21, 2018.

So it was true. No mistake. He was at the right time. The only problem was: Nothing else was right.


	2. Essential Information

**Essential Information**

Saturday

October 26

1985

Marty opened the door of the garage. He didn´t know what to expect. After that morning, when he woke up to a new reality, finding his whole life completely changed, he wouldn´t be surprised even to find Godzilla sitting in his garage. Hell, was he still dreaming?

When he´d woken up he´d seriously believed to have dreamed it all. This whole last week, he´d lived through in another time. This hell on earth, running from a murderous robot from the future, almost being wiped out from history by his own mistake and fearing for Doc´s life just as well. None of this insane scenario could possibly be real, right? It had to be a dream.

This night at Twin Pines Mall (Was that name even correct? He was so confused, he wasn´t sure anymore), Doc getting shot by terrorists … that alone would make for several sessions with a shrink to keep him from going completely nuts.

But it hadn´t been a dream. It had all been real. And by now he knew this.

It was amazing. The change he´d caused could have been so tiny. For some people it might have been. One night in a lifetime. But for his father it had changed everything. The limb who never stood up for himself and who once grew old, consumed by a bitter life without ambition and hopes for the future, had gotten a new chance. This night of the dance had been the proverbial crossroad, when a man has to decide if he wants to go left or right.

Once in his life George McFly had decided to go left, like always. He decided to remain the victim, to keep his head down and hope to not get too many lashes from others. And this decision – if you could even call it a decision – had condemned his whole family to a life in misery and sadness. Sadness about how life was so unfair, how they were always on the downside of opportunities. The kids had learned from the father, that it was better kept your head down and accepted the little crumbs of bread others threw down to you, instead of standing up to face a fight. Even Marty had done it, occasionally. Sadness had a way of creeping into your heart, your very soul until you are consumed by it, and don´t even remember that it could have been different. That the choice was not made by others but by you. On that fateful night in 1955, George McFly had finally understood this. And he had taken the choice. With a little help, but essentially it had been him. And after that … it was amazing how one choice in life could change the outcome so drastically. And in this moment, when he understood this universal truth, Marty could not help but wonder … what would his decisions change, one day in his future?

He stared at the car before him, big and black and polished, only waiting for him to get in and cruise. He needed to reach out and touch it, to believe it was real. It was. God, that was almost too much. Almost.

"How about a ride, mister?" a soft voice suddenly asked and pulled him out of his sleepwalk.

He turned around and there she was. Smiling and beautiful like always.

"Jennifer."

It was breathtaking, just to see her again, after all these days that had felt like a whole lifetime. He walked – staggered – over to her.

"Man, you´re a sight for sore eyes." he said and meant every word of it. He´d felt so tired and exhausted till now, even when he saw all these new developments. But just in this moment his tiredness slipped away. He reached out for the girl he loved and turned her to face him. "Let me look at you."

Jennifer just blinked and smirked about his odd behavior.

"Marty, you´re acting like you haven´t seen me in a week."

He could only laugh about this remark. "I haven´t."

By now she looked truly concerned.

"Are you okay?" she asked. "Is everything all right?"

Marty turned around to the frontdoor, to where his parents stood, arm in arm in sweet harmony. A picture from a book that just had the perfect happy end.

"Oh, yeah." he assured her. "Everything is just great."

And it remained great, almost perfect even, until a huge blast disrupted the silence of this sunny day, and a silver car crashed into the trashcans, hood and roof steaming with dry ice.

**...**

They stopped the car in an allay. Outside it was still pouring. And Marty just sat there, Jennifer in his arms, sleeping. God, was that really happening? He was in the future. The future! And Doc had seriously knocked out his girlfriend. The silence that settled between them right now was tensing. Marty felt as if he could start crying any second and he had no freaking idea why.

"Looks pretty good for a town after a nuclear war." he said challenging.

"That is exactly the point." Doc answered not even looking at him. His gaze was in the distance, somewhere in this world outside. "There was no war. At all." he explained.

"But isn´t that good news?"

"No, it isn´t." Doc shouted and threw up his hand. He really seemed upset about that fact.

"Doc, would you please explain to me what all this is about." Marty begged. "I don´t understand anything."

Doc gave him a regretful gaze. Finally he asked him: "Marty, do you remember what T told us about John Connor?"

"Yes, of course. The guy who sent that T-1000 thing to kill you."

Doc nodded. "I met him." he said. "Thirty years ago. I let T follow you back to the future and while you were away from the DeLorean, he took it and we made our way into 2018."

Marty couldn´t believe it. When he left the DeLorean behind last night to follow that VW bus of the terrorists, he really hadn´t considered the possibility that the car could be stolen. But obviously exactly that had happened.

"Do you remember the certain attempts to assassinate John Connor, T told us about?" Doc went on.

"Yeah." Marty said.

"These attempts, containing time travels of machines back in time are an essential part of the course of events that are supposed to happen, so the future that is meant to be can occur." Doc explained. And as complicated as it sounded, Marty understood the drift immediately.

"A future containing a nuclear war." he completed the sentence.

Doc nodded seriously. "It might sound horrible and cruel, Marty, but that war is inevitable for the future." he explained. "Just like World War Two was inevitable for our present to become what it is today."

Marty just couldn´t stand it any longer. "Wh … What are you telling me, Doc?" he shouted. "That there is no future? That mankind is supposed to die?"

"Of course there will be a future, Marty." Doc denied that horrible vision. "It only won´t be as bright as we always dreamed it would be."

Suddenly Marty felt betrayed. Like he would talk to some salesman that wanted to sell him a gravestone for a beautiful valentines present.

"Yeah, right." he said bitterly. "It´ll be a war zone."

Doc gave him a sympathetic look. "Humankind will remain." he said like a promise. "They will have to fight to survive, but they will survive. Believe me, Marty. I´ve seen them. The resistance is a group of very good and strong men and women, and at the end they will defeat the machines. There is one thing you must never forget considering the future we have to face. Even in the darkness there will always be a light beyond the horizon. Life … humans will remain. It is just a matter of how and when."

Marty needed some time to take all this in. The thought of a terminated future was horrific. It sent hot and cold shivers through his mind and body. But he trusted Doc. He´d always trusted him. If he really assured him, that it would be good at the end …

"Did you see it?" he asked him pleading. "I mean … the victory of the resistance. Did you see it? Were you there?"

Doc gave him a long hard glance. "They will, Marty." he just said. "Trust me on this."

As much as he wished it to be different, but Marty knew instantly that Doc hadn´t answered his question for a reason.

"So you didn´t see it." he spoke it out.

"I probably would have, if I just could go there." Doc complained. "But as you see, the war hasn´t been."

"But that is good, isn´t it." Marty repeated desperately.

"Marty, haven´t you heard a word I said?" Doc asked disgruntled. "Without that war, everything that should be, is now a stake. Something we did changed the past and now the whole space-time-continuum has been disrupted. All our sakes depended on the undisturbed course of the supposed timeline."

"But it got disturbed." Marty finished the summary without really wanting it.

"Exactly."

Marty took a breath. God, that was heavy. But that was the way it was and he had to deal with it. Doc brought him here, to repair some damage. He counted on him.

"So what do we do?" he asked.

"We have to find out, what happened." Doc answered. "On which particularly part of the line the disturbance happened. Then perhaps we´ll be able to go back there and repair the damage."

"How? How are we supposed to find this out?"

"Don´t worry, Marty. I have a plan." Doc said and finally got out of the car.

Marty opened his door and followed him. The rain had stopped by now, thanks god.

"You already said that, Doc." he called after him but Doc was already back. He carried a bag.

"What´s that?" Marty asked.

"To research what we need to know we need access to some more information than we can get on a public library." Doc explained and pointed to the end of the allay. "Over there is the little building. The community that owns the third floor, seeks out every sign of conspiracy and unclear events in the activities of the government all over the world. These people have access to almost everything. If we can use their computers we might find out what we need to know."

"A conspiracy theory - community?"

"Unfortunately they are very suspicious about strangers, so I couldn´t get in on my own." Doc went on with his explanation. He raised a finger, smiling widely. "Fortunately your future son is a part of that community." he said. "Thanks god you look exactly like him. That means we can get in very easily."

"Wow, just a minute." Marty exclaimed. "My son?"

"Yes. In this year, he is almost sixteen, but he looks older than he actually is, so the age difference won´t hurt too much." Doc suddenly noticed a contemplative expression on his young companion´s face. "What is it, Marty?" he asked puzzled.

"I have a son?" Marty repeated amazed.

"Marty please, change into those clothes." Doc begged. "We don´t have much time."

He took another tool Marty couldn´t identify and ran away to the end of the allay. Marty had no choice but to comply and see what would happen.

**...**

"Okay, now what?" Marty peeked around the corner, trying to follow Doc´s gaze.

"In exactly two minutes you´ll go around the corner to the building with the black windows." Doc explained.

"Black windows?"

"The community is very suspicious. They don´t want anyone to look inside and see what they are doing."

"God, Doc. For what lunatics do you send me?"

"Don´t worry, Marty. They will treat you as one of them. What you are … I mean your son."

"Wait a minute." Marty exclaimed. "Are you telling me that my son is a loony? Like them?"

"No, Marty. Actually these people know more than anyone else on the planet, except of the government of course. They have all information they would need to bring down the whole system, they just draw the wrong conclusions."

"Then they have the information that we need."

"Precisely."

Marty thought about this for a minute. "What am I supposed to do when I´m inside?" he asked.

"First try to get access to one of their computers. Your son´s code is 329-weather-balloon."

"329-weather-balloon." Marty repeated to keep it in mind.

"We´re looking for information about a program named Skynet. Cyberdyne Systems. Their files, their projects, their technology."

"Wow, wait, Doc, wait." Marty stopped him. "I don´t know about stuff like that. I ain´t no hacker. How am I supposed to do that?"

"Don´t worry. I´ll join you in a few minutes." Doc assured him. "After I knocked out your son, I´ll ring the bell. You´ll tell them that you know me so they´ll let me in."

"Okay." Marty said. What else could he say?

Doc pulled him away from the corner. "Don´t talk to anyone on the street." he ordered him, looking around like a part of that conspiracy community himself. "Don´t do anything. Don´t interact with anyone except for the guys inside that building. This is very important. We can´t risk to be disturbed in our mission."

"Okay." Marty said and turned around. "Hey, what about Jennifer? We can´t just leave her here."

"Don´t worry she´ll be safe." Doc promised. „It´ll just be for a few minutes. So make sure that it will be just a few minutes."

"You´re the Doc, Doc."

A beeping sound came from Doc´s watch. He looked at it, and jumped.

"Damn! I´m late!" he yelled. "Remember, Marty. Skynet. Cyberdyne System. We must know what they are doing." With that he jumped into the car and started. Marty watched him fly away.

"All right Doc." he said into the empty allay.

Again. What else could he say?


	3. The Future

**The Future**

Marty left the allay and went out to the street. It was absolutely amazing. The town he knew since he was born, his hometown. It looked so different in this time. It was his town, but yet it wasn´t. The streets were still wet from the rain. Only that little detail made it feel real and not just an illusion. As strange as this future world might be, it was still exposed to weather, just like always. Marty could feel the cool and wet wind on his skin.

He crossed the street and noticed a mark on it that said: No Landing. Wow, he thought. Even though he´d been sitting in a flying car mere minutes ago, he still couldn´t believe it. In the sky over the line of buildings he saw the tracks of floating buoys and now and then a car passing by very fast. Almost like airplanes.

People walked by. They were wearing cloths even much crazier than the ones he wore. This was heavy, but in an exciting way.

Marty spotted a shop that read Texaco. But a high tech-Texaco. A car was up there just as he looked. It got filled up by a robot arm, moving on its own. Weird. It reminded Marty of T and what he´d told them about the machines in the future. Suddenly he felt shivers down his spine.

His eyes jumped around to a building across the street from what used to be a very special café. It was a green building covered by a promenade. And it had black windows.

Yes, Marty thought and started to move. He barely noticed the car that landed, just then, right in front of the café.

He crossed the street and looked for an entrance to that building. Beneath the promenades there were black walls, each of them marked with a big red X, like somebody would want to say clearly: Stay away stranger. This is our territory. And man, it worked. Marty felt a need to turn around when he saw that. I hope you know, what you´re doing, Doc.

Well, somewhere here, there had to be a door.

"Hey, McFly!" someone shouted behind him.

Marty halted. The voice was familiar. The situation, too. He turned around and saw a group of teenagers. Bullies. Their leader was a big showy guy with a neck like an ox. He wore a helmet on his head, and somehow this thing made him look like a human rocket. But his face was the real reason for Marty´s frown.

He looked almost like young Biff from 1955. But it couldn´t be him. Could it?

The group approached him. Now Marty realized a difference between Biff´s group from ´55 and this one. Whoever that guy was, he also had a girl in his group of peers. Though she didn´t seemed to be very ladylike. In fact she looked as brutal as her friends.

"I thought I told you to meet me in the café?" the big guy said.

Marty was confused. "Me?" he asked.

"Of course, McFly." he shouted back.

Marty was not sure what to say. Obviously they knew him – or his son. He´d better pretend.

"Oh, uhm." he said. "Hey, sorry guys, I completely forgot. Listen, uhm. I´ll just take care of something and then I´ll join you later, right?"

"Wait, McFly. Not so fast." the guy hold him back. Marty cursed in silence. He should be inside of that damn building already. When Doc came after him, he would wonder what took him so long.

„Look. We can do this right here." the guy said. He looked at Marty like he would expect him to say something special. The problem was, Marty had no idea what to say. Slowly the guy lost his impatience. "Now?" he asked.

Marty just shrugged. "Give me a tip." he asked.

The guy glanced at his friends in disbelieve. When he faced Marty again he looked even more impatient then before. Then he decided to give him one more chance and asked firmly: "Have you made a decision about tonight´s opportunity?"

"Tonight´s opportunity?"

"Yeah, don´t you hear right?" the guy yelled that it hurt in Marty´s ear. His voice was really unnaturally high. "The deal tonight!" he repeated his question.

"What deal?"

"Hey Griff, the limb´s trying to shit you." one of the peers said grinning.

Marty got grabbed instantly and pulled in, too fast to react. "Are you trying to shit me, McFly?" Griff shouted at him angry.

"What? No." Marty felt that Griff released him a little, but not much. "Look, this seems to be some important thing and … nothing we should rush into so … maybe we should discuss this later." he tried again to get away from them. What kind of company was his future son used to? "I´ve got something to do." he said and wanted to turn around.

Griff wouldn´t let him go.

"Later?" he repeated as if he´d never heard that word before. "You will give me an answer right now. What´s it going to be, McFly? Are you in or out?"

Marty looked at him with rising disgust. If this was about what he guessed, he didn´t like the idea of his son to be involved in it. So he said: "Well in that case, when the choice is so thin, I guess I´m better out." He managed it to get the hand of the puzzled Griff off his jacket. "Okay? Bye." he said and turned around.

"What´s wrong, McFly?" Griff shouted after him. "Chicken?"

His legs stopped moving all on their own. Slowly he turned around to face the guy again. Now he really was angry.

"What did you call me, Griff?" he asked.

"Chicken, McFly!" Griff yelled challenging and one of his friends pushed a button on his chest, creating a sound like a clucking chicken. Marty was too angry to notice that Griff hid his arm behind his back. He just walked in on him, to tell him:

"Nobody … calls me …" And in that moment Griff revealed a big red bat, pointing directly at his face.

" … chicken." Marty ended his sentence, much less confident.

Griff swung the bat and after that Marty only remembered to be running.

The group was after him immediately, cursing and shouting. On the other side of the street Marty spotted two little girls on scooters and reacted on instinct. Man that was familiar. Aside from the fact that he was on a board that floated instead of rolling, everything was just the same. Bullies that came after him, an him who tried to stay alive. He almost expected a grim looking T-1000 to show up an try to decapitate him.

Thanks god it didn´t. Things were already crazy enough.

In the end he wouldn´t have been able to tell the details to anyone. All he knew was that suddenly he was soaking wet, and Griff an his gang got arrested for smashing the windows of the town hall, causing a huge crowd to gather around the clock tower.

Holy shit, why could he never get through something like this without causing something like this?

He wiped away his wet hair. Damn. How was he supposed to go on like this?

On his jacket something started to beep, and when he found the button, a sudden wind came up from out of nowhere, blowing all around him like a hair dryer.

"Drying mode on." a voice said. "Jacket drying." After a minute or so it stopped. "Your jacket is now dry." the voice announced and damn, it was right. How cool was that?

He spotted the little girl, he had stopped to borrow her board.

"Hey, kid." he called her. "Hey, thanks." he presented her the board but the little one had already found a new toy. The huge thing Griff had lost on his somersault into the clock tower.

"Keep it." she said, totally satisfied with the course of events. "I got a Pit Bull now."

Marty watched the kids go, puzzled but mostly jealous. To be a little kid again, with no rules and no knowledge of the future. How great would that be.

"Marty!" Doc´s voice suddenly made him spin around. "What in the name of Sir Isaak H Newton happened here? Why are you not where I told you to be?"

"Oh, uhm, Doc, listen …" Marty started and looked over to the clock tower, where Griff and his gang just got arrested. "I was caught up." he said. "These guys showed up and all hell broke loose. I think they know my son. They thought I was him."

"Your son?"

"Yeah. I think they tried to get him into something illegal."

Doc frowned in a very strange way. As if he tried to avoid something. Just the way he shifted from foot to foot.

"Doc." Marty frowned. "Did you know about that?"

Doc didn´t answer. But he didn´t need to. It was written all over his face.

"Why didn´t you tell me?" Marty cried.

"Because we´re not here because of the social contacts of your son, Marty." Doc answered.

"I... I don´t get it." Marty didn´t even pay attention. "Why is my son hanging out with such guys?"

"He´s not hanging out with them, literally." Doc corrected him.

"What do you mean?"

"They … somehow force him to be part of their activities, for some reason." Doc explained. He obviously didn´t like the subject of the talk.

"You tell me that they push him around." Marty said it straight. "Does that mean my son is a limb?"

Doc stopped and faced him. "Marty. Just because he is your offspring doesn´t mean you can expect him to be exactly like you. His character is different, his interests are different. He will be as close to you and as distant as every other child in this world." He grabbed Marty´s shoulders and squeezed them for a moment. "Don´t worry." he said. "Now that the gang got jailed, your son will be safe. Now let´s go and finish the mission why we are here."

They walked over to the building Marty had been about to enter, before all this had happened.

"What´s that?" Doc asked him with a glance at the hoverboard.

"Oh, that´s … just a present from a little girl." Marty said. Doc raised a brow, but spared a comment. For a change.

They reached the black walls with the red X. "I already tried to find an entrance." Marty told him. "But I couldn´t find anything."

"It´s right here." Doc informed him and reached behind a frame that surrounded the black part of the wall. He pushed something there and Marty heard a click. A plate opened and a dial field appeared.

"How was I supposed to find that?" Marty asked while Doc dialed in the code he gave him earlier.

"Didn´t I tell you about that?" Doc asked.

"No, you didn´t."

"Oh, I´m sorry." Doc apologized. "I must have forgotten. Whatever. We´re in."

The door opened and they looked into an elevator. Marty followed Doc´s inviting gesture and the doors closed behind them. Outside the black wall closed itself again, covering the entrance and left no trace of the door the two time travelers had just passed.

For the world there never was a door.


	4. The Community

**The Community**

The trip in the elevator was short but Marty was glad when the doors opened again nevertheless. Doc seemed to be a little tensed too and that wasn´t something to give him confidence. What they saw when the doors opened was … Marty didn´t know a word for it. It looked like a miniature version of Houston Base. The whole room was filled with computers and big shelves that carried parts of computers, some of them connected and working, some of them dead and just stored there. Overall there were beeping sounds and for some reason Marty felt like he just entered a submarine. Perhaps that feeling was created by the black windows that let no natural light into the room. Just the metallic framed lambs that covered the ceiling.

They left the elevator and were about to step forward, when a boy about Marty´s age suddenly appeared from out of nowhere. He wore strange boots and a cap that looked like it was the rest of a plastic package.

"Hey, man, McFly!" he yelled at him. "What a crazy show was that out there?"

"Yeah, that was awesome." a girl behind the boy agreed. She was about 16 and her outfit reminded Marty a little of a disco dancer. They looked both like geeks that didn´t see sunlight for a long time.

Marty shared a glance with Doc. "Uhm … You´ve seen that?" he asked wondering how they possibly could see anything without windows.

"Seen?" the boy asked. "I recorded it. Man what do you think I´ll get for that on OC-N?"

Marty was about to respond something when another guy joined the group.

"We´re not here to make money." he said with a calm voice. Marty immediately knew that this guy had to be the head of this group. He was a little older than the others. Perhaps about twenty. He wore a green jacket that looked strangely like a military imitation.

"Oh come on, Trent." the younger boy begged. "What´s wrong with having a little fun."

"Then post it on WVLN." Trent answered calm. "Then everybody can see it for free." He stared the boy down with a motionless face.

Then he faced Marty and immediately Marty felt like he would get scanned. Trent nodded at him seriously – what Marty took as a formal greet so he returned it – only to face Doc with a suspicious look.

"You know you are not to bring strangers here." he said.

"Uhm, yeah, that´s all right." Marty said quickly. "He knows."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, this is my Doc … my uncle! Doc Brown. Yeah."

"Your uncle?" Trent repeated and came a little closer, scrutinizing Doc. "Hi." he said, nothing more. "You say he knows?" he asked Marty.

Marty was so afraid to say something wrong that he didn´t say anything at all. He just nodded.

"What do you know?" Trent asked Doc.

"Oh, I know for example about the fake news on OC-N that told us to ignore the explosions behind Krugar canyon." he started to tell with his eyes in the air. "I know that the communication system all over the planet is much better connected than everybody wants us to believe and that there is a place where all strings come together. Probably somewhere in Washington.

I also know about the lies government´s still telling about a certain area in Nevada near Las Vegas. My personal guess is that the lights have their source in some nuclear weapon testings and the bodies that were found in 1947 were human pilots, deformed by that radiation." He lowered his voice a little. "Or even some sort of cloning experiment."

Marty didn´t know what to say nor what to think. He just stood there and watched his friend telling all these amazing lies in such a convincing tone, that for a moment, he wasn´t sure if it really was a lie. But of course it had to be. Doc couldn´t really believe what he told there. No way. But he looked so serious. Marty had no idea what a good actor Doc could be. It was almost scary.

But Trent seemed to be impressed by the stuff he heard. When he looked at him again, he gave him a wide smile.

"All right." Trent finally said. "So why are you here? Can we help you?"

"I actually need access to the Cyberdyne Computer System." Doc answered. "I have a suspicion about what they are doing in there and I want to find out."

"What do you suspect?" Trent wanted to know.

Doc hesitated. "I really don´t want to say that without any evidence. I might be wrong. Let´s say I hope that I am."

Trent nodded. "Unfortunately the worst suspicions always turn out to be true." he seemed very caught in the moment. "But I´m afraid we can´t help you much more than everybody else." he said.

"You don´t want to tell me that you have no connection to their system." Doc cried, scandalized.

"Of course we have." the younger boy sounded insulted. "I´ll show you."

He led them to a console with a big screen and entered some codes. Finally a symbol came up that showed a triangle with three squares in it, two of them white, one black. Written beneath that symbol was: Cyberdyne Systems. Please enter your code: _

"But that´s it." Trent said.

"We tried to crack the code but this system is a damn firewall. No matter what we tried neither of us got in yet." the boy explained.

"May I have a try?" Doc asked politely.

The boy gave him some space and Doc wrote something into the free space for the code. He pushed a button and the screen changed. A writing said: Code accepted. Everybody looked at Doc in total disbelieve. Then the screen showed several data with undefinable names and they jumped.

"I don´t believe it!" the boy shouted. "Anna!"

The girl came running. When she saw the screen she just froze.

"How did you know the code?" Trent asked amazed.

"Very simple." Doc replied. "It´s the birthday of the Generals daughter. Kate Brewster."

He started to search the database immediately. Marty just watched him. He had no clue what Doc was doing there. For him the whole screen looked like a strange videogame. But that was no Packman and no wild gunman. It was nothing like this. God, he was glad, that he wasn´t alone in here.

Doc opened some files, that showed plans and sketches for computers and robots.

"Shit, these are their files!" the boy cried and rushed away. "I must copy that! Anna, help me."

Even Trent hurried to another screen. "I prepare the server." he said and started to work.

Doc didn´t pay any attention to them. He was still searching. Te pictures flipped to the screen and back again so fast that Marty started to wonder how he could know what he was looking at.

"Marty." Doc suddenly addressed him. "Go over there to the screen and prepare a copy for me."

Marty went over to the screen and sat down. "What must I do?" he asked.

"There are disks in the drawer." Doc told him. "Put one of them in."

Marty found the little discs and put it into the slit next to the screen. Immediately a menu came up and told him that it was ready to receive.

"Ready." he told Doc.

"I´ll send you some files." Doc said. "Save them."

"Okay."

For a moment Marty wasn´t sure if he should ask Doc how to do that, but as soon as the files appeared on his screen the computer gave all the instructions he needed. He followed them and soon he was in a flow, like he never did anything else. He was quite proud of himself. He hadn´t known how much fun this could be.

Doc on the other hand seemed not very happy at all.

"What´s the matter?" Marty asked him.

"That doesn´t make any sense." Doc mumbled.

"What do you mean?"

"The whole development of Skynet. It´s not like it should be. I mean. In some way it is. But it is too late. Far too late."

"What do you mean too late?"

"Look at this." he said and brought a file on the screen that showed some plans for a robot prototype. Marty went over to him to have a better look.

"The T-1" he read loud.

"This model should have been developed shortly after the turn of the century." Doc explained. "But these files are new. They haven´t even build it yet. Sure, they will soon, but …"

"Too late." Marty finished the sentence.

"I don´t understand that." Doc said. "It´s like the whole development of Cyberdyne was slowed down for at least ten or fifteen years. I just don´t know why."

"I still don´t get it." Marty said and sat down in the chair next to Doc. "Why is that so bad? I mean. The whole … thing will just happen a little later. As you said, it´s not to be stopped. So what? It will happen. What´s the difference if it happens now or in ten years? Humans will have more time."

Doc looked very tired in that moment. He sighed and shook his head. "I don´t know Marty. I have the strange feeling that something very bad will occur because of this change."

"Do you think it has something to do with your … modifications on the time machine?" Marty asked much quieter now.

Doc thought about that for a moment, then he shook his head.

"No." he said. "I only prepared a locker for time travels that would go further into the past beyond the year 1984. That was the year Kyle Reese went back to protect Sarah Connor from being killed by the first Terminator. The danger was that the machines would figure out a way to go back earlier and kill her in infancy."

"But how could T come to 1955 then?" Marty asked confused.

"My modifications included a code." Doc explained. "It would allow one time travel into 1955 without it, for the T-1000, send by John Connor and one that would need this very code to do the same trip. It was meant for T, to get back for us."

Marty stared at him, totally amazed. "You … you can do that?"

Doc halted, blushing a little. "I … got creative." he shrugged.

Marty shook his head. "Okay." he tried to focus. "And now?"

"I don´t know, Marty." Doc admitted. "I really don´t know."

They sat there for a minute in silence. Then Marty smiled. "Wow." he said. "I never thought I would live to hear that from you."

Doc looked at him. First he didn´t understand the meaning of Marty´s words. But then he got the drift and the laughter came to him too. It was releasing. Just for a moment, but that moment was precious. The tension was gone.

"Wow, look at this." the boy´s voice cried through the room. "That must be her. The daughter Mart´s uncle talked about. Here you see?"

Doc got curios and stood up. They walked over to the guy to have a look at his screen. There was a picture of a young woman along with some personal data.

"That´s her." Doc said pointing at the picture. "This is the woman I met."

"Didn´t you say her name is Brewster?" the boy asked.

"Yeah, why?"

"Well, this here says her name´s Katherine Mason."

"Well, I guess that´s because she got married." Anna said pointing to a note on the lower screen, that said: husband: Scott Mason.

She gave her friend a winning grin and he turned away from her, very pissed.

Marty and Doc shared a glance and departed from the others again.

"Is that a point you might have missed?" Marty asked.

"I´m not sure." Doc said. "It´s quite possible that she was married before she met John. I don´t know about their relationship. Maybe her husband got killed on Judgment Day, I don´t know."

"So now what?" Marty asked.

Doc turned to his own screen and returned to his seat. "I will copy some more data." he said. "Go back to your place."

Marty did and took over his task again. After fife more minutes, Doc threw a look on his watch.

"We have to hurry." he said.

"Why?"

"The sleep inducer I used on Jennifer and your son doesn´t work forever. We have to get out of here before the real Marty Jr. drops in."

In this very moment, like it would have been a clue, the elevator made a high beep and the doors opened. Doc and Marty turned around and glanced through the shelves. The guy who came out of the elevator was none other than young Marty.

Immediately Marty ducked under the table. Doc changed his place from his seat to Marty´s as inconspicuous as possible. He fumbled the disc with the copied data out of the computer while Trent and his friends came to find out who just entered their complex. When they saw Marty Jr. they halted, startled. And then Marty Jr. greeted them as if he just entered – what he did – confusing them even more.

"Sneak to the elevator." Doc whispered to Marty. Marty nodded and crawled away.

"Hey, guys!" Marty Jr. yelled with a squeaking version of Marty´s voice. Marty stopped, irritated for a moment. "Man, did you see what happened out there?" his son squeaked, laughing.

"Of course we did." Anna replied confused.

"Yeah? What happened?" Marty Jr. asked. "Somebody smashed the windows of the clock tower."

Doc noticed that Trent started to understand, slowly, and made a decision. Quickly he reprogrammed the computer and sent it to all the terminals in the room. Between the shelves he could see Marty. He was almost at the elevator. He just didn´t dare to leave his hiding place yet. When Trent finally turned around to look at him, Doc pushed his chair into the group and ran to the elevator.

Right when the group was about to follow them, a sound behind them made them jump. The last thing Marty heard was the big screaming noise of an explosion. Then the doors of the elevator closed.

"Jesus, Doc!" he yelled. "You blew them up? Are you crazy? My son is in there!"

"Don´t worry Marty, I didn´t blew up anything." Doc assured him. "I just programmed their computer with a sound effect to draw their attention for a moment."

Marty took a breath to calm down himself. "God, what a day." he said.

"We must hurry now. Lets hope Jennifer didn´t wake up yet." Doc mentioned.

"Oh, yeah." Marty said in a sarcastic tone. "Almost forgot that. Thanks."

**...**

After they left the building they hurried over to the lane where they left Jennifer. Marty almost expected the community to follow them but they didn´t. When they reached the alley Doc suddenly stopped. It happened so fast that Marty ran right into him. Then he just heard Doc crying: "Great Scott!" and got pushed aside to a wall at the corner.

"What is it now?" he asked.

Doc just gave him a shush and glanced around the corner into the alley. Marty did the same and then he understood. There was a police car parked in the alley where an hour before Doc parked the DeLorean. Two police officers stood next to Jennifer.

"McFly, Jennifer Jane Parker." one of them read from a little notebook in her hand. "3793 Oakhurst Street. Hilldale. Age 47."

"47!" her college reacted almost shocked and looked at the unconscious Jennifer. "That´s a hell of a good face-lift."

"What the hell are they doing, Doc?" Marty asked concerned.

"They used her thumbprint to assess her ID." Doc explained. "Since the thumbprint never changes over the years, they simply assume she´s the Jennifer of the future."

"We´ve got to stop them."

"What we gonna say?" Doc asked. "That we are time travelers? They´d have us committed."

"She´s clean so we take her home." one of the officers just said.

"To Hilldale?" her partner asked. "It will be dark until we get out there."

"That´s it. They´re taking her home." Doc realized. "To your future home."

"What? Hoho. No way, Doc. They take her nowhere." Marty said and passed the corner without paying attention to Doc´s objections. He just walked into the alley straight to the two police women.

"Hey!" he called them. "Uhm, good afternoon. What´s wrong officers?"

"Who are you?" one of them asked him.

"Ehm, my name is Martin McFly." Marty said. "That´s my wife Jennifer. What´s the matter?"

"You are Mr McFly?"

"Yeah? You want my ID?" he offered his thumb to them.

For a moment they hesitated but then the one with the notebook nodded and came to him. He pressed his thumb to the plate and a moment later some data came up. The young officer read them and then gave him a look.

"You´re 47?" she asked him.

Marty gave her a humble smile and nodded. "Uhm, yeah, we … went to a special clinic." he told them getting a sudden inspiration. "It was my anniversary gift for her. So what?"

"Nothing." the officer replied disturbed. "Uhm, sir, are you aware that your wife lies unconscious in an alley?" she asked him.

"Uh, yeah. Look. I just left her here about ten minutes ago. She … had a hard day and I didn´t want to disturb her."

"A hard day?" the officer repeated.

"Yeah, she had a couple of drinks." Marty added to make it more believable. "I would appreciate if you would treat that confident. I´m working in a conservative business."

In fact Marty had no idea in what business he would work in later. He still looked forward to become a rock star, but obviously these two women didn´t like rock music. Otherwise they should have known him. Now was that a good sign or a bad one?

"We always do, Mr. McFly." the officer assured him. "Do you need any help?"

"Oh no." Marty denied. "Thanks, but … my car is over there. I´ll wake her up and then … I´ll get her home. Thank you."

"All right, Mr. McFly." the officer said and touched her hat. "Have a nice day then."

Marty waited until they were gone, then he hurried to Jennifer. Doc came running to him, excited like a little boy.

"Marty!" he cheered. "That was phenomenal. The best act I´ve ever seen since Shakespear´s Julius Caesar at Hill Valley Theater 1967."

"Thanks Doc." Marty replied. "Sometimes you could just trust me a little."

"Yeah, you´re right, Marty. I´m sorry. Now let´s carry her to the time machine and go home!"

And just in this moment Jennifer moaned.


	5. War Zone

**War Zone**

When Jennifer suddenly groaned, Doc and Marty just froze. Carefully they looked at the sleeping girl, expecting her to wake up any second. She didn´t. Yet.

"We must hurry." Doc whispered and together they carried her out of the alley, back to the DeLorean. When they lay her into the passenger seat she groaned again.

"Can you make her sleep again, when she wakes up?" Marty asked.

"The sleep inducer is low on energy." Doc shook his head. "We must hurry and hope to reach 1985 before she wakes up."

"Okay."

When Marty squeezed himself into the car, next to Jennifer a whining noise came from the back seat.

"Hey, Einstein." Marty greeted the scrubby dog, surprised. "Where do you come from?"

"I left him in a suspended animation kennel." Doc explained, smiling. "He never knew I was gone. Just picked him up before I joined you."

Doc quickly brought the car up to the skyway, as fast as he could without breaking any future traffic laws and accelerated. A moment before they reached 88 miles, Jennifer moved, jerking. Not more than a reflex of her body, but for Doc and Marty it came from out of nowhere. Her knee hit the time circuits and Doc had just enough time to notice that their destination time had switched. He gasped, reaching out a hand, but it was too late.

The flash all around the car blinded them both. And then it was just dark outside.

"Doc, what happened?" Marty asked, leaning forward to see what was around them. "Where are we? When …?"

He stopped mid-sentence, staring ahead wide-eyed. When Doc followed his gaze, his heart almost stopped from pure shock. A big machine approached them, and it wasn´t an airplane. It had a big cone on each side and two very bright headliners. And it didn´t move like an airplane at all. It moved more like an insect. An insect that was sneaking in the middle of the night, looking for pray.

One of the lights spotted them.

Doc changed their course immediately but the thing had already started to shoot. Marty screamed and then something hit the bottom of the car. Doc felt the impact and had more than some work to keep control over the car. It swirled and the engine made a whining noise that didn´t ease his mind at all. They headed for the ground way too fast. In a last desperate act he steered upwards, raising the hood, to avoid a direct crash. It worked but only for a second. They hit the ground hard and uncontrolled. The DeLorean skidded over the ground, shrieking like a dying animal, sparks flying left and right to them and eventually it crashed into a wrecked part of a wall that didn´t belong to a building anymore.

For a moment they were just stunned. Doc wasn´t sure if he passed out for a moment. Then the light crossed them again and they instinctively ducked their heads. The light moved on and left them in the dark. Obviously they assumed them dead.

"Are you all right?" Doc asked Marty, but the kid was more concerned about Jennifer.

"What was that?" he asked. "Where are we?"

Doc looked at the time circuits. "Great Scott." he whispered and looked at Marty as if looking at him would somehow make this truth he´d just discovered go away. Or save him from having to reveal it.

"According to the display … we are now in the year 2028." he said.

"2028?" Marty repeated half screaming. "Why? How did this happen?"

"Jennifer hit the instruments before we left 2018. I´m afraid that disturbed the destination time input."

"But what are we doing now? What´s going on out there?"

"Oh, Marty." Doc was shaking.

"We´re not in Hill Valley, are we?" the boy interrupted him.

Doc didn´t give a response. He couldn´t bring himself to say it. But it wasn´t necessary at all. Marty saw his expression and just knew it.

"Jesus." he cursed, hitting the backrest with his head. "Then it is true. All of it."

"I´m afraid it is." Doc said. Behind them Einstein whined, as if he understood every word they said. "I´m sorry, Marty." Doc sighed. "I never wanted you to see this."

"Forget about me seeing this." Marty cried. "Let´s just get out of here."

"Marty, you forget one thing. We just crash landed and even without a closer examination I can already tell you that the DeLorean is most probably seriously damaged."

"You mean we´re stuck here?"

In that moment Jennifer groaned again and this time she opened her eyes. Doc and Marty watched her coming back. For a moment she frowned, startled. Until she found Marty´s face.

"Marty." she looked about. "Where am I?"

Marty opened his mouth to answer her but didn´t know what to say. He glanced at Doc for help. And Doc opened the door.

"I´ll check the damage." he said and got out, Einstein following right behind.

"Marty, what´s going on?" Jennifer asked again. She started to squirm in his lap, feeling clearly that something was wrong. God, she didn´t even know half of it.

Outside Doc circled the time machine, trying to assess the situation, and the damage done to the car. Einstein circled as well, but the area around the car, like a real well trained watchdog.

Doc got down on his knees and looked underneath the car. What he saw was not encouraging, but still not as bad as he´d feared. The silencer was squeezed but at least the fuel line wasn´t ripped. He could see that one of the dampers was completely ruined but that wasn´t a problem at all. As long as the car could still fly.

He looked under the hood. The distributor cap was cracked. Water was spilling out of the cooler and oil was leaking, practically everywhere. The left headliner was smashed too, probably when they hit the wall. He would be able to fix the crack in the cap if he would get the time. Perhaps even a paperclip could do it. And leaks were easy to fix as well. If they were lucky this would be the only problem to take care of. Maybe they had really gotten lucky.

Just when he closed the hood again, Marty and Jennifer got out of the car and looked around, respectfully. Fearfully. Jennifer swallowed with a dry throat. Doc wondered how much Marty told her.

"How bad is it, Doc?" Marty asked him.

"Not as bad as I suspected." he told him. "The worst thing is the cracked distributor cap. I can repair it but I will need a little time."

"Is it dangerous for us to stay here?" Jennifer asked. She was still searching for a sign of trouble in the distance.

Doc considered to lie for a moment but then he decided that he owed them the truth. So he said: "Yes. It is."

She threw him a pleading gaze. He couldn´t stand it so he rounded the car. He opened the trunk and took out some of the luggage he´d brought. Now he was glad that he always prepared for every contingency, even if nothing of this ever happened.

"What is that?" Marty asked when he handed each of them a vest.

"Special fiber cloth." he explained and slipped into one of the vest himself. "The bullet proved vests of the future. This fiber can stand big heat and almost every bullet that could get fired at you."

"Almost?"

"There´s always a risk." he admitted, reluctantly. "But this way we´ll be much saver in this area. And our chances of survival will rise up to … 80 percent. If not more."

Marty curled up one corner of his mouth. "You almost sound as cheery as T." he remarked, but took on the vest. Jennifer just followed his example in silence.

Doc shut the trunk and went back to the hood.

"Now help me. I need to fix that crack in the …" but he didn´t get any further. A sudden blast disturbed his speech and made them all duck down. Somewhere in the distance something exploded. They heard flames shooting up and then there was a noise as if a house came crushing down. Screams, desperate and angry. People were shouting at each other and then there was more shooting. Another explosion followed. The noise seemed to be all around them. Everywhere.

Doc could hear Einstein barking, somewhere in the distance, but he could not see him anywhere.

A big fireball flew over their heads. Marty and Jennifer jumped and just ran. Doc was about to do the same when he realized that if the DeLorean would get hit they would be trapped here forever. Unsure he hesitated by the car. The last thing he could do was take cover again, behind the hood, before a wave of fire washed over him.

He felt the heat floating over the car, suffocating and all consuming. Please, he begged to the invisible power of the mighty science. Please, don´t let it destroy the time machine.

Then the fire was gone. Doc glanced over the hood. The crashed machine lay far ahead, nothing more than a heap of junk now. The fire had probably been an outburst caused by the impact. Now it was perfectly still, except for a couple of small flames.

Quickly he circled the DeLorean. Thanks god it wasn´t destroyed. Just a little grilled. The windows were black now but the body looked still good. It would run again. It just had to.

Then he heard shots again. They were much closer now. He spun around and searched the area with his eyes.

"Marty!" he called. "Jennifer!"

Around the corner of the wall he heard footsteps and hurried over to it. But it wasn´t Marty he ran into. Suddenly a gun was pointed at him. In shock he skipped back but a hand grabbed his collar and pulled him around the corner. The next second he found himself pressed against the wall.

"Who are you?" somebody hissed at him.

"M.. M.. My name is Brown." he answered. "Dr. Emmet Brown."

"A Doktor, huh?" the other one replied and pressed the gun into his jaw. "Maybe I should perforate you a little to make sure there is no metal beneath your skin."

"Please, no!" Doc cried. "I´m not a machine. You´ve got to believe me."

"Come on, Dick." a female voice said and a hand landed on the man´s shoulder. "We don´t have time for that. We´re not out of this yet."

The woman came into Doc´s sight. When she saw him, she suddenly halted, as if confused. But then she turned around and pushed down the man she´d called Dick. Doc got dragged down along with them. A second later something hit the wall over him, exactly where his head had been. Dust and stones fell down on him and he brought up his arms, protectively.

"Terminators!" the woman screamed and they started to shoot.

Doc glanced over, at the horizon. Over a heap of wreck, what undoubtedly had been a building once, he saw a group of men. They carried monsters of weapons that shot light, probably lasers. Each of them had a face that was horribly familiar to Doc. It was the face of T, the Terminator that saved his life in 1955.

The man and the woman started to run. They were still shooting. Doc didn´t hesitate any longer. He followed them. In a desperate but foolish act he covered his head with his arms. He knew it wouldn´t save him from getting shot but he couldn´t help it. When he saw the two soldiers taking cover behind another heap of wreck he did the same.

"I´m here with two friends!" he yelled over the noise of their guns. "They must be somewhere!"

"I don´t see anyone." the man answered.

"But they were right behind me."

"Hey!" the man shouted at him. "What do you expect? We´re not the cavalry."

"I must find them!" Doc insisted and was about to get up but an iron hand held him back. It was the woman.

"I wouldn´t do that if I were you." she said. Her words were underlined by more laser shots.

Dick fired back and seemed to hit something, cause he cheered with hateful laughter.

The hand pulled Doc a little closer. He looked into cold and merciless eyes.

"If you want to stay alive, you should come with us." she said.

"But my friends." Doc tried again.

"You can´t help ´em out there." the woman said, emphasizing the word you.

Suddenly they heard someone screaming in the distance. Doc understood the word the familiar voice called: Jennifer!

He spun around and glanced over the edge. There he was. Marty. He´d just grabbed Jennifer and ducked with her behind a wrecked car body. Behind them the remains of a building provided them with some protection from enemy fire.

"Marty!" Doc yelled and got pushed down immediately.

"Shut up, you fuck!" the woman hissed at him.

"Doc!" Marty´s voice answered. "Doc, where are you?"

"I´m over here!" Doc yelled, ignoring the threatening grip of the woman.

"Let me shoot him, then he _will_ shut up." the man said.

"No!" the woman said and it was not mercy that made her say so. It was a simple cold order, from a soldier in charge of another.

"Doc!"

"We must help them." Doc grunted under her iron grip.

Another salve of lasers tore through the air over their heads. Dick fired back but had to take cover immediately.

"No way." he said.

The noise of an impact made them wince. Doc looked over the edge and saw a big hole in the wall of the building behind Marty and Jennifer. The construction wouldn´t stand this much longer.

"Marty!" he yelled. "Get out of there!"

This time he got hit over the head for this and more laser were fired at them.

"If he makes another sound I will shoot him." Dick cursed.

Doc groaned but managed it to keep his eyes open. He saw Marty behind the car body. He held Jennifer´s hand, looking around in haste. The kid hesitated if he could dare to come out and run over to him. Then he made a decision. Doc could see it in his eyes. And then there was the shot.

Marty suddenly burned, like a human torch and got thrown aside. Over his own shock, Doc heard Jennifer scream Marty´s name. Then the both of them were gone behind the car body. Another impact in the building made it crash down at last and maybe twenty tons of rocks buried the car under their weight. They left nothing but a big cloud of dust.

"Noooooo!" Doc screamed.

When somebody grabbed him and pulled him away, he wasn´t even able to struggle. His eyes were fixed on that dust-cloud. And they stayed fixed on it, until he got dragged around a corner, eventually thrown down into a hole.

Someone closed a door and everything around him went dark.


	6. Regrets

**Regrets **

Doc trembled. He was on a stair that led down, deeper under the earth. He had no chance to stay at his place. Somebody still pushed him forwards. Then there was light and he finally could see something again.

He was in a tunnel. The walls were smooth and cold. Concrete. They reached the end of the stairs and he could see a small room. There was a table with a radio transceiver on it. At the backside there were two doors that probably led into more tunnels. There was no doubt. This was a bunker.

The woman pushed him against the wall.

"I refuse to stay here as your hostage." Doc said.

"Shut up." was all this woman would respond.

"I will not!" Doc objected. "My friends are dead because you refused to help them. I will not …"

He got interrupted by a much stronger push, this time from Dick. He pressed his gun against Doc´s jaw.

"Just because we´re now down here, doesn´t mean that I can´t shoot you anymore." he threatened.

"If you only want to kill me, why did you bring me here?" Doc asked. "You could have left me out there."

"Dick, take the gun away." the woman ordered. When he didn´t listen she grabbed him and pulled him away from Doc. For a moment he struggled, but when she grabbed his weapon he froze under her glare.

"I said … put that thing away, soldier."

Dick obeyed reluctantly. "He´s right." he said angry. "Why did we bring him here? What´s so fucking important about him?"

"I just thought Trent would like to see him." the woman said and took off her helmet.

Doc gasped when he recognized her. It was Anna, the girl he and Marty had met in the community. The man took off his helmet as well. It was the boy, years older. Doc realized that he´d never asked for his name. Looking at him now was another shock. The boy looked so old. His eyes were red and the skin around them burned. Obviously a long time ago.

"Why?" Dick asked again.

"Are you really so stupid or is it just a joke of yours?" Anna asked him. "I know you can´t see him very good, but he told you his name.

"And?"

Anna groaned in exasperation. "Forget it." she said and walked to the door behind the desk.

"Go and burn the rest of your brain."

She dragged Doc behind and he followed. What else could he do? There was nothing outside of this bunker worth to go back to. Marty and Jennifer were dead and there was a high probability that the time machine got destroyed in this fight before. So why should he struggle? It was obviously his fate to end up here in a future he´d tried to save so desperately.

"Are you a part of the resistance?" Doc asked the woman while they were walking down the hall.

"Of what?" she asked back.

"The resistance." Doc repeated. "Against the machines."

"Who told you that fairy tale?" Anna said.

"That is no fairy tale." Doc insisted. "I talked to them. Their leader is John Connor. I saw your radio. You must have heard his messages. He uses to send them frequently."

"Listen." Anna pulled him in. They´d reached another door. "There is no resistance and the only reason why we have the radio is to stay in contact with each other. Believe me, there is no one out there who could send anything."

"And even if, we couldn´t help ´em, since they are too far away." a man that suddenly was in the door added.

Doc recognized him at once. It was Trent. The man looked at him like he never had expected anyone else, to visit him today. He inched a little closer … and smiled.

"So, Doc." he said. "What do you know now?"

**...**

After an hour of intense talking, an hour that felt like a whole day or two without sleep, Doc had to admit that he didn´t know anything at all. Not anymore. Trent had told him what happened after he and Marty had left. Thanks to their new gained access to Skynet the community had managed to figure out what was going on. For the first time they had had real information and not just theories.

They spied on Skynet for at least two years. They knew that something was about to come. Though they tried to warn the world no one would listen to them and so they decided to use their resources to figure out a way to survive. Together they found this bunker and prepared for Judgment Day, what occurred on August 29, 2023. Since that day they lived in this area along with some other survivors – three to be precise – all of them in their own hiding places.

No one had ever heard about a resistance or a man named John Connor. People were fighting only to survive, to avoid getting caught by the machines to be brought to one of their working camps. An organized battle against the machines was nothing but a lost hope. No one was foolish enough to try that, not even to believe that somebody would ever try it.

Doc couldn´t believe it. "What about time travel?" he asked and got a puzzled reaction.

"About what?"

"You don´t know about …" Doc suddenly realized. If there never was a resistance led by John Connor, the machines never had a reason to travel back in time. So why should they need to use that technology?

"Is that how you got here?" Trent understood. "You traveled through time?"

"Don´t be a fool." Anna said. "Things like that don´t exist."

"So how do you explain him being here?" Trent argued. "And that he doesn´t look a day older? God, he even wears the same cloths."

Anna´s eyes widened. When she looked at Doc she skipped back a little, as if afraid of catching a bad disease from him. "That´s impossible." she whispered.

"Why did you come here?" Trent asked Doc without paying attention to her.

Doc felt a sudden grief. "We … We didn´t plan to come here." he said. "It was an accident. When we realized where we were, it was too late."

His voice broke at the end of his sentence and he couldn´t go on. What a cruel fate was that? He invented a time machine, a real time machine, just to travel into a future that was destroyed and to watch the death of his only real friend. And all this was his fault, his alone.

Perhaps he thought, John Connor was right when he tried to kill me and prevent time travel.

But that was the point, wasn´t it? That was why he went on with it, even though he knew the consequences. Because the invention of time travel was a necessary part of that time line that brought John Connor to life in the first place. Without time travel, no John Connor, without John Connor, no hope for the future of the human race. But now the exact opposite had happened. The influence his time travels had had on the time line, had prevented what it should have ensured. How was that possible? Wasn´t that a paradox of the worst kind? Doc just didn´t know anymore.

Where was John Connor? Was he still alive? Or was he killed on Judgment Day like so many others?

"I´m sorry about your friends." Trent said. "But if you really have a time machine …"

Doc just shook his head. "You shouldn´t hope that it can bring you away." he said. "It´s destroyed. After that firestorm out there, it might me smashed into a million pieces by now."

His gaze went blank. He thought back of how afraid he´d been, that the time machine could get damaged, while Marty and Jennifer had ran away right into their certain death. Again he saw the dust cloud before his eyes, that had swallowed them. It was all his fault. He never should have brought them here.

"We can´t be sure about that before we saw it." Trent pointed out.

Doc didn´t give a response. He was trapped in his thoughts. His regrets and his sorrow. Trent waited a minute. When he still got no reaction from Doc he said: "Tomorrow we´ll go up and search the time machine."

And that was it. The decision was made.


	7. Staying on Course

**I apologize for the long ... very long wait. I know it wasn´t fair. But I´m not a quitter. I just ... procrastinate. Especially since there weren´t any reviews I didn´t really think anyone still cared if I keep writing the story or not. Again, I´m sorry. I will try to finish this story, at last. **

**I´d say it´s about time, isn´t it?**

* * *

><p><strong>Staying On Course <strong>

The ruins of Hill Valley lay silent and dead in the dark of the night. The Terminators were already gone since they didn´t find anything left that was worth to be hunted. The only thing that brought some light into this moonless night, were spread little fires that idly burned here and there.

Beneath a heap of wreckage there was a rumbling sound. Something pushed from inside, trying to break free. The rocks were too heavy and eventually the pushing stopped. Several minutes of silence later a peace of junk, got kicked away further down, at the bottom of the heap. An avalanche was the result, rolling down in a big cloud of dust.

Now that most of the weight was gone, the pushing was more successful. Together Marty and Jennifer lifted the door of the wrecked car that had saved their lives when the building came crushing down on them.

"I don´t believe we´re out." Jennifer sighed exhausted.

"Can you see anything?" Marty whispered, looking around.

"No." she answered. "There´s nothing."

"And nobody." Marty added, sighing deeply. Then he got up. "We´ve got to find Doc." he said.

The movement made his clothing fall apart. The vest Doc had given them earlier had shielded him from the fire but now it was burned. Another shot like this and Marty would really be dead.

Jennifer´s vest was also burned but it wasn´t half as bad as his. He patted the vest off himself like he would pat off some dirt. And after all that was all that was left of that vest. His shirt was scorched too, mainly at the sleeves, but his chest was unharmed. This fiber was really unbelievable. In his mind he thanked Doc for the idea.

"Marty, your arm!" Jennifer cried, grabbing him carefully.

He turned to her and looked down on his arm. It was burned but he didn´t feel it.

"Shit." he hissed and touched it. It was disgusting, he almost wanted to vomit. His flesh felt still hot but so soft like he could peel it off if would rub to hard.

"It´s all right." he lied. "It doesn´t hurt, just … leave it, all right? We don´t have the time for this now."

Jennifer agreed in silence and together they made their way through the ruins to search Doc.

"Do you remember where we landed?" Marty asked, confused by all the destruction around him.

Jennifer looked around and finally pointed in a certain direction. Marty followed her gesture and spotted a little peace of a wall that stood between the ruins.

"Right." he said. "That has to be it."

"You really think that he´s still alive?" Jennifer asked quietly as they walked on.

There was a shaking fear in her voice, and Marty could relate to that. He needed some deep breaths before he could answer. He said: "We´ll find him."

And that was it. They didn´t talk anymore, the rest of the way. At every rock or heap of debris they stopped, and looked around very carefully. Not only to make sure no machine would suddenly attack, but also to make sure they wouldn´t walk past Doc. If he lay there somewhere, he´d need help. He could be hurt and unconscious. Marty´s greatest fear was not to miss him though. His greatest fear was to _find_ him. Dead.

They rounded a heap of wreck and his feet froze. There in the mud – blood? – lay a body, stretched out and distorted. But then his eyes adjusted and he realized that what he saw was nothing but another part of a former building. His eyes were playing tricks on him.

Suddenly one of the shadows jumped at him and Marty skipped back. There were glowing eyes and a growling sound. The shadow started barking, just before it hit him.

"Einstein!" Jennifer cried.

Marty couldn´t stop laughing and hugging the faithful dog, while it joyfully licked his face.

"Oh God it is so good to see you too." he ruffled the furry head. It was dirty. Above him Jennifer looked about. Marty followed her example, but Doc was nowhere in sight.

"Einstein." he addressed the animal as if he spoke to another human. "Einstein, where´s Doc? Where is he?"

The dog started to whine and lowered his head. Marty almost wanted to cry with him. He fondled the dog´s head as if he tried to comfort a friend. And wasn´t that even what he did? Were they not mourning the same friend? Slowly he got up.

"It´s all right, boy. It´s not your fault."

So it was true. Einstein´s reaction was the last evidence and this time he couldn´t deny it anymore. He met Jennifer´s gaze and saw tears in her eyes. He pulled her in for a hug, and for a while they only stood there, arm in arm, trying to compute, to accept what usually could never be accepted. Not in a long time.

But here, nothing around them was usual. And circumstances just didn´t give them the luxury to grieve. And so they went on, without another word, to get back home. If they still could. Because that was what Doc would have wanted.

Finally they reached the time machine. It was unbelievable but it was still there, almost undamaged. The black windows fooled them for a moment but a closer look reassured them. It was still intact. It could run again. With a little patchwork.

"Can you repair the damage?" Jennifer asked, hopefully and Marty sighed.

In moments like this he´d used to count on Doc to save the day. But Doc wasn´t here. He probably would never be here again. _They_ survived because they´d been lucky. Very lucky. Could they really expect that the lightening would strike twice at the same spot? Hardly.

No, he had to face facts. That Doc was most probably dead and that they would never get out of this nightmare if they wouldn´t find a way to help themselves.

"I´ll try it." he said and his voice cracked.

Jennifer nodded, to tell him she was with him, no matter what. It didn´t work. Only her hug was able to give him a little comfort. After all he had to get on. Not just for himself but also for her. Doc wouldn´t have wanted them to give up. He would have wanted them to get home.

**...**

When Anna opened the hatch of the bunker the first light of day just appeared beyond the horizon. Doc followed them outside. He barely slept last night. He had tried to contact someone over the radio. He had tried to reach John Connor and his resistance but no one would answer. After that he tried to reach J.J. He still recalled her frequency but the result was the same. Nothing but static and silence. As if he was be the only human being on this planet and this radio the only one that was still running.

After this night he was truly convinced that the world was lost.

He had no hangover because of the missing sleep but he was tired. Not in his head but in his heart. He lived to face the worst nightmare. Humans were doomed without any hope for the future and he was impotent of doing anything. There was no time machine out there, he was sure about that. After that battle yesterday it was just impossible. Going out and look for it was redundant.

But Trent and his fellows insisted and so he had no choice. He followed them like a dog, carrying the gun Anna had given him earlier like a broomstick. When he had tried to refuse the weapon she had told him she would shoot him herself in case of a machine attack, just to make sure he wouldn´t slow them down. Reluctantly he had accepted but he felt as wrong in his skin as one only could. Lately he developed a real aversion against weapons. He rather wanted to smash the infernal thing to the ground.

"Well, where is your precious time machine?" Anna asked.

Doc sighed. "We crash landed over there." he said and pointed in the direction.

"All right, then let´s go." Anna said already leading the way.

On their way they passed the heap of ruins that had been a building yesterday, before it smashed down onto a car body and two teenagers. Doc recognized the place immediately and halted. For a moment he considered to go over there and look for Marty and Jennifer. But then he decided that it wouldn´t do any good. What could he gain other than more pain, especially if he really found them.

A hand tapped him on the shoulder and he looked into Trent´s sympathizing face. "Come on." he said. "Don´t look back. We can´t change the past."

Doc went on with him, his words strangely ringing in his ears. Once he´d been able to change the past. Marty once did it, by writing him a letter._ He_ did it by changing the construction of his time machine. J.J. did it by sending T back in time to protect his and Marty´s life. Yes, he had been able to change the past. But that was before the time machine was destroyed.

For a single moment he allowed himself the little hope that the DeLorean would still be there. Undamaged and ready to start after some repair work. But when they reached the little wall there was nothing. No car, no wreck. Just an empty space.

"Are you sure about the place?" Trent asked.

"It was right here." Doc said.

"The machines must have taken it." Anna hissed and grabbed her gun faster. "Bastards!"

"It doesn´t help." Trent said. "We have to go on. We still need food and water. I think we better go."

"Where?" Doc wanted to know.

"We take our food from town." Trent explained.

"Exactly like in the good old days." Anna added cynical. She shouldered her backpack and smiled. "Let´s go shopping."

**...**

Marty looked out through the windshield with a little grumble in his stomach. The DeLorean flew but he couldn´t say for how long. The repair work he´d managed was not quite the quality Doc would have delivered.

"Will we go back now?" Jennifer asked him.

He didn´t answer at once. "No." he finally said. "Not yet. First I have to do something."

"What?"

"Doc and I came here to find out what happened. Something we did, changed the past. This is the result. We have to fix that, Jennifer. I owe that to Doc. I can´t go before the mission isn´t accomplished."

"But … how do you want to find out?" she asked.

"I have an idea." he said and steered the DeLorean to a place that looked like the old town of Hill Valley.

Finally he spotted something that looked like the rest of the clock tower and brought the car down. He was right. It was the ruin of the clock tower. Most of the buildings here were still intact so he landed in a street, where he could be sure the car wouldn´t be spotted that easily. An allay. Was it possible that it was the same allay Doc had parked only yesterday, when he´d brought them to the year 2018?

Does it make a difference, he asked himself, and got out of the car. Of course it didn´t. Because it didn´t change anything about the fact that yet again he was stranded in a strange time, knowing that his friend was no more.

"I still don´t believe that all this is really happening." Jennifer said, glancing around this ghost town that once had been their home.

"Me too." Marty agreed gloomy. He put an arm around her, needing her just as much as she needed him now. Beside them Einstein looked up, as if he wished he too could do something to comfort. Marty fondled his head, only for a moment. Together they walked over to the building at the end of the street.

"What are we doing here?" Jennifer wanted to know.

Marty lead her into a pocket that was beneath a half broken promenade. On a black wall that was marked with a read double-X he started to investigate the frame with his hand, searching. Then he found it. A little keyboard showed up and he entered some numbers. Immediately after he did this, a door unsealed itself, with a strangely hollow fizzing sound.

"We finish our mission." Marty answered the question and stepped in.

Upstairs they found the room in a total mess. After he found the light switch it was like entering a bombed out pentagon. The terminals were still there but everything was loose and broken hardware lay all over the room.

"Einstein, stay here." Marty ordered the dog, making his way through this mess of open cables and junk. It wasn´t easy to reach the terminal but a few pushes and kicks and the trash gave way at last.

"God." he panted, annoyed, shaking his head. "We were just here yesterday."

He halted for a moment, still unable to believe the change. Twenty-four hours ago he´d seen this room in a shape, as if he´d walked into an Apollo space ship. Now it was … a junkyard.

"Not yesterday, Marty." Jennifer reminded him. "Ten years ago."

He threw her an embarrassed glance. Was it already that bad with him, that she had to remind him of the fact that he was traveling through time? He nodded and kept on climbing through the mess. It was more than luck that the main terminal was still working. Trent and his buddies must have been really good at what they did. Marty switched it on.

"What exactly are we looking for?" Jennifer asked behind him.

"Doc wanted to find out what happened with Cyberdyne." Marty told her while he accessed the database. "Now that Judgment Day has happened we should be able to find out the whole schedule … and the deadline."

He kept on working. Looking through the database turned out to be easier than he´d expected. In time he felt as if he´d never done anything else and after a while he truly found the data he was looking for. Around 2020 they created a revolutionary microprocessor, the so called Beckett-Processor. Three years later they became the largest supplier of military computer system for all their allies all over the world. Military planes, called Stealth bombers got upgraded with their computers, to enable them to fly completely unmanned.

Heavy, Marty thought and scrawled further down.

After the funding bill was passed, the Skynet System went on-line on August 4th, 2023. All human decisions were removed from strategic defense. The Skynet System was supposed to learn by itself. It did. The records showed a geometric learning rate. Unbelievable that all this happened in just a few days.

Then something happened on August 29 at 2:14 a.m. Eastern Time. The records said that the military tried to shut down the system unsuccessfully. After that there was a record about launching almost every missile in America against targets in Russia, China, North Korea and Iraq.

"Oh my god!" Jennifer gasped behind him.

"Yeah." Marty agreed. "A third world war without any winner. Except maybe machines."

"No." Jennifer corrected him. Marty turned around and found her watching a screen. She gave him a worried glance and said: "I meant this. Look."

He walked over to her and looked at the screen. He saw a distorted picture of the street outside. Jennifer must have activated the camera the community once used to look out as an alternative for a window. On the other side of the dried out lake he saw three people. They looked like soldiers. They left what looked like a destroyed shop at the corner. Though they were far away, one of them looked familiar. Marty couldn´t say why. It was something about the way the man walked. He also held his gun very different than the others.

Following his inner voice he reached for the keyboard and zoomed in. The picture of the three people came closer and the resolution blurred for a moment. When it became clear again, Marty almost got a heart attack.

"Doc!" he shouted and at the door, Einstein started to bark. "He´s alive! Jennifer!"

"He might not stay alive for long." Jennifer damped his enthusiasm. She quickly typed something into the keyboard and the camera panned into the air. In the distance there were several flying machines, like the one they´d faced after their arrival. One of them was changing its course and headed directly for them.

"They´ll find them." Marty cried and jumped for the door. "We have to warn them."

When the doors of the elevator opened downstairs, Einstein was the first one who ran out and over the street, barking all the way. The three people there, halted and stared at him as if he was a raging beast. Only Doc reacted with relief and went down to his knees, catching his dog in his arms, happily.

"Einstein!" he cheered. "Hahaha! Good boy! Oh I´m so happy to see you."

When he spotted the two people that came running towards them, he straightened, in shock. "Marty?" he mumbled confused but he needed only three seconds to overcome his irritation. "Marty!" he yelled, laughing and waving.

But Marty´s waving was not for greeting. He looked very distressed.

"Go back!" he and Jennifer shouted unisono: "They´re coming!"

As if this had been the cue for them, the machines showed up over their heads. The turbines made an awful noise and such a strong wind that it pressed all of them down. Einstein still tried to scare away the nasty thing in the air, barking bravely but of course he got ignored. The first shots came down and everybody jumped. The machine turned around to shot again. And again. And again.

"Quick!" Anna yelled and ran over to the Texaco station. "In here!"

She opened an iron gate and waved them in. They all followed. Inside she slammed the gate and locked it with a big bolt. Immediately after she was finished a loud beat hit the door from outside, deforming it. Everybody skipped back. Another beat followed but the door didn´t give in … yet.

Doc took advantage of the break they´d caught, and grabbed Marty´s shoulders. It happened so from out of nowhere that Marty screamed in shock. But then he heard Doc´s laughter and relaxed into the embrace.

"You´re alive!" Doc shouted. "You two! I thought … How? Where have you been?"

"That´s a long story, Doc." Marty uttered, desperately trying to breath. "I´m glad to see you too."

"We thought you were dead." Jennifer explained.

"But how did you get here?" Doc asked, still grinning.

"With the DeLorean." she answered.

Doc released Marty so fast that he dropped to the floor. "The time machine?" he asked surprised. "It is here? It still runs?"

Another beat hit the door, this time it was louder.

"Yeah." Marty said and stood up, rubbing his back. "If they didn´t get it by now."

"If it looks like an ordinary car, the machines won´t be interested in it." Trent said.

Marty meet his gaze for the first time and froze when he recognized him. Trent smiled and raised a hand.

"Hi." he said. "It´s been a while."

Marty couldn´t answer. He just nodded. Then he managed it to ask: "Is my son with you guys?"

Trent shook his head. "No. He and his girlfriend headed to L.A. last year. God knows why."

Another beat at the door. Now the iron started to give in.

"If there is really a time machine, you better go for it." Trent said.

"They?" Anna yelled objecting.

"Yeah." Trent answered. „They. This is not their battle. As far as I understood it, nothing of this should be this way. That means their battle is in the past. They can prevent this from happening. Right?" He looked at Doc.

"Technically …" Doc wanted to correct him but Marty lay a hand on his shoulder, stopping him.

"You´re right." he said. "We could stop it. But how are we supposed to get out of here?"

The next beat almost smashed the door. A crack appeared in it. The barrel of a big shotgun was tucked inside and started to shoot. Everybody got down and remained on the floor until the shooting stopped. Anna jumped up immediately, ran to the door, tucked her own gun outside and shot. Judging by the sound it made, she hit something. But even Anna jumped back when the next beat hit the door. The crack widened. Two mechanical hands grabbed it and started to tear it open.

"Quick." Trent shouted. "Over here."

He opened a trapdoor that was hidden behind a desk and pushed them down.

"It leads into the allay behind the building." he explained. "We´ll distract them. Hurry."

"But …" Marty objected. "We can´t just leave you here."

Anna came to stand by Trent´s side. They looked at each other in a certain agreement. Trent gave Marty a nod.

"Go." he said. "If you make it, nothing of this will have ever happened. Go. Save our future."

Marty was speechless. He returned the nod, unable to say anything and simply followed Doc and Jennifer outside. Trent was right. The tunnel led them directly to the next allay. They got out, closed the door and made their way around the building. The sound of the fight was still awfully loud in their ears.

When they finally reached the end of the street a big blast disrupted the air and when they turned around the Texaco station was gone. All they could see was fire. The shooting had stopped.

Yeah. They truly distracted them.

Marty was the first who broke the silence.

"Come on." he said. "Let´s go. Let´s turn back time."


	8. Cosmic Significance

**Cosmic Significance**

Marty sat in the DeLorean, Jennifer on his lap as they slowly rose and reached the clouds. Finally they left this battlefield behind. This nightmare of a destroyed future. God, he was still shaking. He´d be shaking thinking back on that for a long time.

The car didn´t fly very good either. The repair work he had done seemed to be worse than he´d hoped. It already rumbled badly, shaking as if they didn´t fly but instead drive over a very bad road with lots of potholes. Without a miracle, they´d surely fall out of the sky very soon. Marty closed his eyes and sent a prayer to heaven.

Suddenly a something hit the car, shaking them, and beside him Doc started to scream. Marty opened his eyes. On their hood there was a robot in human form, completely made of glistening metal. Its mechanical fingers clawed into the body of the DeLorean, red eyes glowing evilly at them. The skull grinned as if it wanted to say: I´m about to kill you. Just wanted you to know.

"Shake it off, Doc!" Marty yelled. "Shake it off!"

Doc wheeled like a mad man but the thing just wouldn´t fall off. It clung so hard as if it was glued there. No chance. Something cracked inside the car and Doc halted, scared to crash the DeLorean himself. The machine reached out, and smashed the windshield. A billion pieces of glass rained down on them, cutting into their skin. Jennifer screamed, clinging to him. But the machine reached out for her and soon she got pulled out of his arms.

Marty tried to hold her, grabbing frantically, desperately, but the machine was too strong. Doc lost control over the car and they went into a nosedive. Everything around them swirled, no forms left of the world, only noise and color. Doc was still trying, what little he could, to throw the thing off their hood. It just swung its arm at him, and a moment later the Doc hung out of a cracked window, blood trickling from his skull.

The ground inched closer, faster and faster. The DeLorean spun, completely out of control, and the cyborg was still on it. As if all of this swirling didn´t even bother it. It opened its mechanical mouth and let out a screaming sound that ran through Marty´s brain like a knife. It almost sounded like a laughter. Then they hit the ground.

Marty jumped up in his bed, gasping and sweating. Oh please God no! Please …

He wiped his face, panting in utter terror. His heart was beating into his throat, threatening to suffocate him. Dear god, what a nightmare.

As soon as he felt able to he stood up and almost fled his room. He had to return to his normal life as fast as possible. He needed to get these pictures out of his head.

Down in the dining room he met his brother Dave, taking a late breakfast before heading out for the office. It was almost ten.

"Jesus, Marty!" Dave shouted when he saw him and his gaze was genuinely worried. "You look awful. Did you sleep in your clothes again last night?"

Marty just nodded, earning another worried glance from his brother. "Are you all right?" Dave asked, frowning deeply.

"Yeah." Marty just said. "I just need a shower." But first he had to make a phone call.

"Before I forget it." Dave called him back. "Jennifer called, while you were sleeping."

"What did she want?" Marty was back in the kitchen, instantly. Had something happened?

"Nothing special." Dave answered confused. "Though she sounded bleary. Exactly like you look now." he added smirking. "It´s none of my business but if Mom finds out what you two did last night …"

"Not now, Dave!" Marty interrupted the dumb joke. "I´m not up to this." And with that he left his brother behind, grabbing the phone and dialed Jennifer´s number with shaking hands. She answered after the second ring.

She really sounded bleary. But as soon as she heard Marty´s voice she seemed relieved. She too had had a nightmare, she told him. She called two times already, only to make sure he was okay.

And somehow this slightly insane notion of her, not so unlike the one he´d felt himself only a few minutes ago, made him feel better. Saver. He wasn´t alone in all of this. Jennifer knew. She´d lived through the same nightmare, and she knew. It would take a while for both of them to believe that everything would be all right again. But at least they weren´t alone.

After they said their goodbyes Marty called Doc. It rang five times. Six times. Marty already started to worry. But then he finally answered. He told him he was so deep into his work that he´d first run to the door when it rang.

"Just wanted to hear if everything is all right." Marty said.

"Sure, I´m fine. Oh, before I forget it. I need the information you got from the future. I don´t want to rush you but without these information I can´t complete my evaluation."

"It´s all right, Doc." Marty assured him. "I´ll come over after I took a shower."

And he did. He left the house an hour later, a little better than before. Definitely cleaner.

For a moment he considered to take the new truck but his legs were aching for movement, so he took his board. A little fresh air, out in a street that wasn´t destroyed by futuristic machines would help to come back to his own time. Back to himself.

Just as he set the board down, ready to go, Biff toddled past him, towards the garage, some wax and a cloth in his hand. He greeted Marty with a wide grin but didn´t stop to have a chat. And all the sudden Marty noticed a strange limb in the man´s steps. Not just a little. Biff was limping pretty heavily and now that Marty payed attention to it, he caught a glimpse underneath his too short tracksuit pants. Was that really … a wooden leg?

"What´s the matter?" Biff asked, and Marty suddenly noticed that he´d been staring.

"What happened to your leg?" he asked, still too shocked to apologize for it and for moment Biff glanced down on himself. His silly grin was gone instantly, replaced by a gloomy expression.

"Don´t mock me with that." he growled. "I don´t like it, you hear me?" In this moment he looked more and strangely the same time less like the old Biff than ever. "What do you even want?" he sulked, and limped away. Marty didn´t know what to say. He´d surely expected everything, but not to feel pity for Biff.

A hand dropped down onto his shoulder, and Marty spun around, startled. The solemn eyes of his father were following Biff´s retrieve just as quiet as he´d done it. Minus the shock maybe.

"He lost his leg in a car accident." he told him. "It´s a long time ago. We were still at school. Was a strange thing. After he woke up in the hospital, he couldn´t remember how it happened."

"I didn´t know." Marty said with a cracked voice. It was scary. Especially since he had a nagging feeling that he had somehow caused this. Knowingly or not.

"I´ve gotta go." he said, wanting nothing more than to finally get out of there.

His Dad nodded. "Me too." and with that he left for his car, most probably to go to work. Just like Dave.

Marty finally mounted on his board. He had some work of his own to do.

As he rolled down the driveway a little girl with two black Rasta pigtails suddenly appeared from out of nowhere. He dodged just in time, avoiding to run her over and lost his balance. The girl giggled in good humor when he hit the ground.

"Oh boy, Marty." she gasped between her laughter. "I bet that hurt, didn´t it? ´Cause it did!"

Marty paused. Did he know her? She seemed to know him.

He groaned getting up, and had a closer look at her. She was about seven years or so and something about her was familiar. But he wasn´t sure. Perhaps she was related to his neighbors. He knew their little son Danny, a two year old that always waved at him, squealing happily when he was in the garden with his daddy. Yes, considering that, he found some resemblance between her and Tarissa, Danny´s Mom.

"Are you Danny´s cousin?" he asked her, kicking up his board.

The girl looked confused yet amused the same time. "Marty, what are you talking about?" she asked, revealing a row of bright white teeth, almost too white for a dark face like hers.

"Well, Danny." Marty said pointing to the house of his neighbors. "Danny Dyson. His family lives there."

The girl turned around to the house and faced him again with a raised brow. "Very funny, Marty."

He was about to give some response, when at the other side of the street the door was opened and two people came out of the house. It was Tarissa, his neighbor. But the man beside her … he´d never seen _him_ before. Where was Miles? Her husband. Marty was confused.

"Blythe." the man called for the girl. "Honey, come on. We want to go. Last call for the zoo."

Blythe hesitated for a moment, still looking at Marty.

"Blythe, listen to your father." Tarissa called and the girl finally turned and crossed the street. Both, Tarissa and the man waved at him.

"Hi, Marty." Tarissa greeted, her smile just as white as the girl´s. Familiar. But damn … so not familiar all the sudden.

Marty raised a hand and waved back. Then Tarissa kissed the man beside her and he got into the car with Blythe. Marty watched them go while Tarissa went back into the house, one last smile for him. That was impossible. He knew that family for years. Tarissa and her husband were happy together and their little son Danny was a cute little boy. She would never betray Miles with another man. Especially not in front of everybody to see it. What the hell was going on here?

Behind him Dave left the house, heading for his car. When he saw Marty he halted.

"Hey, what´s the matter? You look as if you´ve seen a ghost."

Marty pointed over his shoulder to the house and asked: "What´s the name of that family over there?"

Dave gave him a confused look. He seemed to consider if Marty was mocking him.

"What is all that?" he wanted to know.

"Just answer my question." Marty snapped and regretted it right the next moment. Damn he really was stressed out. "Dave, I´m sorry." he said. "I´m sorry, I don´t know … I´m sorry."

He was about to turn around when Dave lay a hand on his shoulder. "Is everything all right?" he asked.

Marty hesitated. What should he tell him? No, nothing is all right? I saw the future and it was a nightmare? I learned that the whole world, everything you see, is gone and I even know the date it will happen? Should he really tell him that? What do you think, Dave? Is everything all right?

But he didn´t say anything about it. He just mumbled a yes and assured that he was fine.

"I just forgot the name." he added pointing to the house. He answered Dave´s worried gaze with a simple shrug. "Bad night." he said.

"Jones." Dave finally answered his question. "Marty, you sure you´re all right? You know Larvell and his family since you´re born."

"Yeah, yeah, I´m fine." Marty said. "Look … I gotta go. Bye, Dave." He jumped on his board and rushed away. One thing was fore sure. Some things had changed since 1955.

**...**

When he reached Doc´s place he found the scientist buried in a huge heap of newspapers. They were everywhere. On the desk, the shelves, the floor. Even the hood and the roof of the DeLorean were packed with newspapers. It looked as if Doc had plundered every single archive in Hill Valley.

"Doc, what are you doing in here?" he asked, though he had a pretty good guess.

"I borrowed these newspapers to find out what happened since 1955." Doc explained, still frantically going through one of the heaps.

"You brought all newspapers since 1955?"

"Only those from Hill Valley but I had to start somewhere." Doc excused himself. Marty just didn´t know what to respond. And the Doc just didn´t seem to realize that he had even arrived, just yet.

"Yo, Doc. I thought you wanted to know my info." Marty skipped back, when Doc rushed past him, to place a heap of papers on a spot, probably to start a new heap.

"Yes, yes, of course." Doc finally abandoned his sorting fit, and freed a chair for him. "Sit down." he said, while he carried the papers away to store them on his desk.

Marty placed himself on the chair, not daring to move away from it. It was almost scary to sit between all these heaps of old papers. The garage he knew so well, suddenly looked very strange.

When Doc finally came back to him, Marty began his report, repeating what he´d read on the terminal in the future as best as he could. Everything he could remember about the development of Skynet and Judgment Day. After he was finished he felt exhausted. Doc on the other hand looked very contemplative. He ran to his blackboard without a word and started to write.

Marty didn´t care what he was writing. He would tell him soon enough. Then something popped into his head. He stood up and approached the scribbling Doc carefully.

"Just one more thing." he said. "I don´t know if it is important. Uhm. There are some differences in my … environment at home. The first thing is Biff´s leg."

"Biff´s leg?" Doc asked, not looking up from his blackboard.

"Yeah, he suddenly has a wooden leg. Dad says he lost it in a car accident while he was still at school."

"And what is the other difference?" Doc asked further. He was still writing.

"Well, that´s the family that lives next door … I´m not sure. They´re not the same, I mean … Tarissa is still the same, but everybody else isn´t."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, she´s married to another guy, now." Marty explained. "They used to have a son but now they have a daughter. Their name is Jones now."

"What were they called before?" Doc was still writing, still thinking in light speed.

"Dyson." Marty answered.

Now Doc halted. He was about to write a calculation and stopped halfway through a 4. Slowly he turned around and looked at Marty. After a few seconds he passed him and went over to his desk. Obviously there was a computer under those papers. As soon as he´d freed it, Doc started to type. Marty followed, more than just confused. What was he doing?

At last Doc found what he was looking for.

"That´s it." he shouted but he didn´t sound very happy. "The microprocessor Skynet invented. You said they called it Beckett-Processor."

"Yeah." Marty affirmed.

"But I remember that it should be the Dyson-Microprocessor. The mechanic in the future, Mike, he told me about it."

"Wait a minute. The Dyson-Microprocessor?" Marty repeated. "Doc, that is …"

"Correct." Doc shouted. "That´s it. That must be the missing part. It´s Dyson. Your neighbor. What was his full name?"

"Miles." Marty said. "Miles Dyson. But Doc, he´s surely not the only one on the planet with that name. What are the odds …?" he halted, thinking, and closed his eyes, cursing. "Shit, he´s an engineer of some sort." he remembered just then. "He works for a big company."

"That has to be it." Doc pointed out, now absolutely sure. "If we find out what happened to Dyson we might be able to go back to the point in time, when the change in his life occurred, and stop it from happening."

"What change?" Marty asked. "I mean … how are we supposed to find out what it was that changed his course? It even could be as simple as his family moving away. Perhaps he just lives somewhere else than here. You don´t know if it is him. He could be some other engineer working for a big a company."

Doc thought about this for a moment. "You´re right, Marty." he said and typed something into his computer. The screen changed to a dark blue screen with a state symbol in the center. Doc typed in a password to the empty space beneath it and got access.

"What are you doing?" Marty asked him.

"I´m looking for Miles Dyson in the database of the registration office." Doc explained.

"Wait a minute. You have access to the database of the registration office?" Marty repeated disbelieving. "How did you got that?"

"Not important." Doc shouted, still working, and eventually: "I don´t find a Miles Dyson." He thought a moment and typed some more. "At least not today." he mumbled while typing.

"What are you doing now?"

"I look for his birth certification. Do you know his birthday?"

Marty blinked. What? "Sorry, no."

"Doesn´t matter. There won´t be too many Miles Dysons in Hill Valley. How old was he?"

"Uhm, in his forties. Forty-fife I think. I´m not sure."

"All right, then I´ll look for births between 1935 and 1950, just to make sure we won´t miss him."

Soon enough the computer showed them a list of three. The first was a Miles Thomas Dyson, born in 1938. The second was a Miles Joseph Dyson, born in 1942 and the third was a Miles Bennett Dyson, born 1947.

"Try this one." Marty said and pointed to the last name on the list. "That could be him. The second name sounds familiar."

Doc did and the computer showed them a more detailed file of the man. It said that he was born on October 18, 1947 in Hill Valley state hospital.

"All right, then let´s have a look at his life." Doc mumbled and read over the whole file. He already was about to close it and look somewhere else when he noticed something. At the end of the page there was a note that said: died 1955. Doc gasped.

"What? What is it?" Marty asked. Then he saw it too. "Holy shit." he cursed. "Doc, that must be it. Oh shit, you think that T-1000-guy killed him?"

Doc kept typing into the computer and then shook his head. "No." he said. "It says that he and his whole family were killed in a car accident." He turned around and searched the garage for something. Then he focused on a certain place and went over to a heap of papers next to his desk.

"I think I´ve got the papers from 1955 here." he said and started to examine the papers. "I remember that I read something about an accident earlier. I didn´t pay too much attention to it but …"

"Wait, I´ll help you." Marty joined him.

They worked about half an hour until Marty finally picked up the right page. There was a photo above the article. It showed the place of the accident with police and ambulance in the background. The car was lying upside down, obviously totally crashed. Whoever had been in there was dead. The headline said: Family dies in car accident. Unfortunately the article itself was unreadable. Someday the paper must have been in contact with a lot of water. It was curly and washed out.

"Shit." Marty spat out. "Without the article we don´t know where or when this happened."

Doc started to look for something on his desk. "It´s the paper from November 13, 1955." he said while he was searching. "So we know that it was the day or the night before."

"The day before November the 13th? That´s the night I went back, Doc."

"Precisely." Doc affirmed. "But that´s not the most important detail." He found what he was looking for and came back with a magnifying glass.

"What is it then?" Marty asked.

Doc examined the photo closer. A big smile spread on his lips. He tabbed at the photo and handed Marty the magnifier. "Look who´s sitting there in the ambulance." he said.

Marty did. When he recognized the guy he almost forgot to breath. "Biff." he whispered. "I don´t believe it."

The old photograph in the paper was blurred and yellowed, but it was clear enough to see that the guy that sat there in the ambulance truly was Biff. He was surrounded by two medics who took care for his leg and his face was contorted in pain.

"My Dad said he lost his leg in an accident … and that he couldn´t even remember it." Marty explained. "Or claimed not to remember it." Then he suddenly knew it. "God! T shot him the day in town. When the T-1000 tried to kill me. He shot him in the leg."

Doc nodded. "That inconvenience must have caused the accident."

"Jesus!"

"I think now we can be sure. That accident is the point that screwed up the time line, that was supposed to be." Doc went on. "That is what we have to fix."

"Right. So we go back to the day when T shot him and stop him from doing so …"

"Wrong." Doc interrupted him. "We can´t just interfere with the events of that day. We might risk to disturb our own past. The consequences of that could be disastrous."

"Okay, of course. So what do we do?"

"I see only one possibility. We have to go back to that day, November the 12th and follow Biff. Since we have no information about where or when this accident will occur …" he held up the messed up paper. "… we can only watch every step he takes until the moment is there. Then we somehow have to save Biff and the Dyson family from getting into that accident."

"Right." Marty said and looked over to the time machine. "When do we go?"

Doc shrugged. "Is there anything you have to do first?" he asked.  
>Marty just shook his head, though he guessed what that would mean.<p>

"Then I see no reason to wait." Doc said and went over to the DeLorean, followed by his dog. He tabbed him on the head and said: "No, no Einstein. You´ll stay here this time. It won´t be for long."

The dog sat down, whined a little. It almost sounded as if he was disappointed. Marty rounded the car but hesitated to get in.

"Uhm, Doc?" he asked. "What if we can´t prevent it? I mean … All this about the future. What is the difference between the future you saw and the one I saw? As far as I understood it, they are both messed up. Isn´t it the same no matter what we do?"

"Not at all, Marty." Doc said and he sounded somehow sad. "The future you saw had no hope. In the original time line there was a resistance … and a man that led humans to a near victory."

"Right." Marty said gloomy. "This John Connor."

"I did some research about him too." Doc explained. "He should be born by now. But there is no entry about his birth. Though I found his mother, Sarah Connor. She has no child and as far as I could see it, she won´t have. You see. The disrupted time line didn´t only change the life of Dyson or Biff or ours. It also changed the natural course of things from the past that has to run its course from today into tomorrow and back again."

Marty looked at Doc confused. "You lost me, Doc." he admitted.

"It´s very simple. Since Judgment Day occurred much too late in this time line, something happened that prevented the birth of John Connor. Perhaps his father wasn´t born or he was killed before he could go back in time. Since there is no resistance, that could send him, it could be anything."

"How do you know that he won´t be just a little late this time?" Marty argued. "Perhaps he´ll be born just a little later."

Doc didn´t answer at once and Marty already thought he won the argument. But then Doc said something he didn´t expect at all. He asked him: "Did you know that World War Two only started in 1940 because in Hitler´s opinion it was much better to fight a war with fifty than with sixty or seventy?"

Marty blinked, totally confused. "What?"

"He was running out of time." Doc explained. "And so is John Connor. You´re right, Marty. It is possible that his father will arrive here in our time later than he was supposed to. Perhaps he will arrive today but he also could arrive five years from now. Or ten years from now."

"So what?"

"Don´t you see? It´s not only the man. It´s also the circumstances of his childhood, his education, the people he met. If he misses just one of them that was highly important, he will miss the target. Maybe he will be too young to fight the machines. Maybe he will miss a special lesson he was supposed to learn. We can´t know."

Marty was still not convinced. In his opinion there was no point at all that would be in Connor´s favor. Doc seemed to guess that.

"I still don´t get it." Marty admitted to him. "What´s so special about that guy? As if there is no other man that could lead an army against whoever. I mean … there are more than just a few good soldiers today."

Doc shook his head and looked at him very sad. "It´s not that simple, Marty." he said and Marty groaned.

"I just don´t understand, why we of all people in the world should want to save the guy, that tried to kill you."

"Marty. This isn´t about me or any of us. This isn´t even about John Connor. It´s about mankind itself." He looked at him in a meaningful silence. "You´re right, that there might have been other men who could have been the leader against the machines." he went on. "But as you see, there are no others. At least not if events go on the way they will, if we don´t interfere. The reason for that is to be discussed by philosophers but the cold fact is, that there won´t be a future without John Connor. If you like it or not."

Marty didn´t give a response. He knew that Doc was right. Damn, he knew it. But, God, how he hated it. For the first time in his life he wished that Doc would be wrong. How the hell was he supposed to deal with the fact that the fate of mankind depended on their actions? If they would succeed or not would determine if mankind would have a future or not. But, please, by all means, no pressure.

"If you really don´t want to come with me …" Doc suddenly said and interrupted his thoughts. "... I will have to do it on my own."

For a moment, Marty was stunned. Did he really mean that? Did he really think he would let him go alone, not knowing what would happen? They were in this mess together. Every reluctance was forgotten and a sudden determination took over. He got in the car and closed the door.

"We better get started." he suggested with a straight face. "We´re wasting time."

And, with a proud smile on his face, Doc joined him, taking his seat at the wheel of the DeLorean.

It was time to go.


	9. Back in Time

**Back In Time**

Saturday

November 12

1955

Marty walked up the street. It was half past seven. With the period clothes he´d bought following Doc´s advise, he barely stood out. A black jacket with a fitting hat. Appropriate. The only thing that admittedly were a little over the top – but not too much – were the sunglasses. Those he´d bought as a little joke, just for himself. They reminded him of T.

All in all he found himself pretty cool. Secret agent Martin Seamus McFly. Mission: find Biff and stop him from screwing up the space-time-continuum. You will be on your own but whenever there is an emergency, the operator (Doc) will be there to support. The future and all good hope of human kind depends on you. This message will self destruct right after you read it.

After all the scenario didn´t sound too fantastic. He´d already located Biff´s house and if luck would stick with him, he´d find Biff very soon. So not bad for his first day as a secret agent. The only problem was the house itself. It just didn´t look … right.

With a silent curse he took out his walkie-talkie. "Doc. Come in, Doc. This is Marty. Over."

"Roger, Marty. This is Doc." his operator answered. Marty took cover behind a car, just in case someone could watch.

"Are you there?" Doc asked him.

"Yeah, Doc. I´m at the address." Marty answered. "It´s the only Tannen in the book, but … I don´t think this is Biff´s house. It looks like some old lady lives here."

"What are you doing?" he heard a high voice, right by his side, and Marty jumped.

Two adorable blue eyes glanced at him, curious, like every six year old. Marty´s heart pounded like a hammer.

"Jesus." he cursed and hit the car with the back of his head.

"Biff Tannen lives there." the little one told him concerned, as if she needed to warn him, not to get any closer. "He is a mean guy."

Marty paused. "Biff Tannen, you say?"

"Yes." the girl said. "He lives with his Grandma. But the old lady is mean too. She always scares us away from her fence, even if we don´t do anything. I think she don´t like kids."

Marty was relieved. So it was the right house.

"Hey, thanks for the info kid." he smirked, but she wasn´t quite done yet.

"Why are you here?" she wanted to know.

Marty hesitated. But before he could answer she went on: "You don´t want to go in there, do you?" she asked. "You shouldn´t. He wouldn´t like you."

"Don´t worry. I won´t go in there. I just wait here for … well … I just wait here."

"For what?"

"Well, that´s a secret."

"Did he do anything bad?" she asked.

"Not yet." Marty replied, knowing that he was probably sparking her curiosity too much.

For a moment the little girl seemed to give in. Then she said: "You are the boy that blew up the car yesterday in town."

Marty halted. He felt caught in the act like a running criminal. Caught by a six year old girl. What a joke.

"That was another guy." he claimed. "I would never do such a thing."

But she wasn´t convinced, at all. The little girl shook her head, totally serious, and informed him: "It was you. I saw you. I was in town with my daddy. And _he_ said you are a gangster because this policeman was after you."

"Yeah, listen …" for some reason Marty felt the need to restore his reputation. "That´s a long story." he checked the house again, with a brief glance over the hood. "Believe me, kiddo." he said smirking. "Things are not always what they seem."

"Then you are not a gangster?" she asked.

Marty couldn´t help but laughed. "No." he assured her.

"That´s what I thought." she said and made him laugh again. She was just too serious for her age.

"What´s your name?" he asked her.

"I´m Jessie." she introduced herself and reached out her hand for him. He shook it.

"I´m Marty." he answered. Then he had an idea. "Hey. You seem to know the people around here quite well." he said.

A bright smile appeared on her face. She nodded. "I live here since I was born." she told him proud.

"Well, that´s great. Do you know a boy named Miles? Miles Dyson? He´s African American and he should be … yeah, around your age by now. Maybe a year older. Do you know his family?"

The little one thought about his question very seriously, a deep frown on her tiny forehead. Then she shook her head. "No." she said. "None of my neighbors has the name Dyson. Are you sure they live in Hill Valley?"

"His family is about to move here." Marty explained.

"If you know that, why don´t you know where they are?" the girl asked reasonably.

Marty almost didn´t know what to answer. She obviously had a point. But then he knew it. He said: "I was supposed to meet them, but I don´t know where."

"Oh." she said. "That´s bad for you."

"Yeah."

"I could ask around." she offered kindly. "Maybe one of my friends knows him."

"Yeah, good idea." Marty praised. "You do that."

She began to laugh, happily and ran away, to get to work right this instant. Marty followed her with his eyes. The little one reminded him of someone. He just couldn´t quite say of who.

Suddenly there was a sound. Somebody was leaving the house. Biff!

He walked on crutches, due to his bandaged leg, but faster than necessary, as if he tried to get away from this squeaking voice calling after him from the house.

"Where are you going, Biff?"

"I´m going to get my car, Grandma." he called back. "I told you, it´s still in town. The ambulance brought me home. You know that."

"When are you coming back?" she wanted to know. "I want you to rub my toes."

"Shut up you old bag." Biff mumbled. He left the garden and limped down the street.

Marty took out his walkie-talkie again to call Doc. "Doc. It is Biff´s house." he told him. "I´m on him. Over."

He didn´t wait for a response but hurried to follow Biff. Despite his disability the guy was still a fast walker.

**...**

Jessie hurried too. She had already asked all her friends about that boy Miles but they were more interested in playing ball than to help her. So she went on alone. When she reached the courthouse square, she suddenly knew whom to ask.

She burst open the café´s door so fast, that Goldie the waiter spun around with an annoyed `Hey´! When he recognized her, he got the same expression he always seemed to get, when he saw her. As if he wanted to say: Not again.

"Jessie!" he said, quickly putting the milk and coffee down on his customer´s table. "How often do I have to tell you, not to break the door?"

"I´m sorry." Jessie said.

When suddenly a little boy ran out from behind the bar, her eyes widened. For some reason she immediately knew that this was the boy Marty was looking for.

"What do you want?" Goldie asked. "Are you alone? Where´s your dad, kid?"

"Uhm, he´s outside." Jessie lied.

"Ah, yeah?" Goldie put his fists on his hips. "And why can´t I see his car? Jessie, you know you are not to tell fibs."

Jessie lowered her eyes, ashamed, but only for a moment.

"Okay." she admitted. "But I´m on a secret mission. I have to find a boy named Miles Dyson."

Now Goldie frowned in concern and glanced over to the boy at the bar. Jessie´s heart jumped, she could hardly control herself.

"Who said that?" Goldie wanted to know.

"A friend of mine. He said he was supposed to meet Mile´s family but he don´t know where."

"And who is this friend?"

"I can´t tell you, it´s a secret." Jessie apologized. "Do you know Miles?"

"I´m Miles." the little boy said behind her, much to Goldie´s annoyance.

Jessie spun around and jumped. "I knew it." she cheered. "I knew it, I knew it."

"Okay, kid." Goldie stepped closer, to make her stop. "Listen." he was trying to sound serious like adults should when they talked to children. "If your friend wants something to know about my cousin … he has to talk to me. Tell him that."

Jessie nodded. She was completely happy. Her mission was accomplished. That was all she wanted. She spun around and left the café as fast and loud as she´d entered it.

**...**

Marty pressed his back against the tree, watching how Biff struggled to get into his car with his crutches. He could hear him cursing and swearing that he would break the neck of the guy who did this to him.

Then, when Marty was already convinced that Biff was about to start the car, something made him halt. It was the sound of two giggling girls at the other side of the street. Marty followed Biff´s gaze and spotted his mother. She and a friend of hers just left Ruth´s Frock Shop, happily examining their merchandise. Marty felt a shiver, recalling how T and his opponent had smashed that shop, in the night Marty went back in time. It was quite possible that Lorraine was the last customer this shop would see for a while.

"It´s perfect, Lorraine." he heard the other girl praise the dress, she´d bought. "You´re going to look so beautiful."

Lorraine giggled happily and danced around with the gown. Biff smirked delighted and made his way over to her. Suddenly his limp didn´t seem that bad anymore. Marty prepared himself. That was the chance to get into the car. He waited until Biff´s attention was fully on Lorraine … and got stopped by an unexpected interference, just as he wanted to jump up.

"Marty, I found him!" somebody shouted right next to him and he swirled around, heart pounding. His back smashed into the tree again and he cursed in silence. God, how did this kid sneak up on him?

"Jesus, kid!" he cried, panting. "You can´t do that to me."

"Sorry." she whispered, instantly catching up on the fact that he was spying on Biff. Marty gave her a nod and glanced around the tree. Biff was busy talking to Lorraine.

"Biff, why don´t you take a long walk off a short pier?" Lorraine suggested, trying to get rid of him but of course he was persistent. Even on his crutches he kept her pace without much effort.

"Hey, listen Lorraine." he even managed it to block her way and make her stop. "There´s that dance at school tonight. Right now my car is all waxed and all … I think I´ll cut you a break and give you the honor of going with the best-looking guy in school."

"Yeah, well I´m busy." Lorraine said.

"Yeah? Doing what?"

"Washing my hair."

"Ha!" Biff laughed out. "That´s as funny as a screen door in a battleship."

"Screen door in a submarine, you dork." Marty corrected quietly and beside him Jessie covered her mouth with both hands, giggling. Marty couldn´t help it. He smirked too.

"Look." he turned to her. "I´ve gotta go."

"Wait." she grabbed his sleeve. "I found Miles. The boy you were looking for."

For a moment Marty was speechless. "You did?"

"Yeah." she beamed, bouncing proudly. "He´s Goldie´s cousin. He said, if you want something from Miles, you have to talk to him."

Marty thought a moment. Goldie? The waiter. No, the future mayor. Jesus, what a mix. But that at least would explain Miles Dyson´s job at a company that worked for the government.

"That´s great, Jessie." he praised her. "Good job, really. Thank you very much." He fished a bill from his pocket. Some change he´d left over after buying the clothes. "That´s for you." he gave it to her. "For your help."

Her eyes went wide in awe. "Really?" she asked, in disbelieve and he flashed her a smile.

"Sure. That´s how grown ups do that. They get an assignment, they do it, and they get payed. You did a good job so … here´s your money."

The kid took the bill, still in awe. He was sure she was trained to always say thank you, but in this moment she was simply too stunned to remember.

"Go and get yourself something nice." he told her, meeting her round eyes, and for a moment he wondered if his parents would ever consider having another kid. Maybe a little girl.

The voice of his mother disrupted the sweet idea, and he was back to reality.

"Get your cooties off me." he heard her shout and when he glanced over the street, he saw Biff, pressing her to his chest.

"When will you finally get it through your thick skull, Lorraine?" he asked and pulled her even closer. "You are my girl."

"I tell you something." Lorraine said. "I wouldn´t be your girl even if you had a million dollars!"

Then she kicked his bandaged leg and Biff screamed in pain. In case it wasn´t enough, she hit him over the head with her box and Biff went down to the ground. Marty clenched his fist, cheering in silence. Go for it, mom.

On the other side of the street, Biff struggled up, clinging to a parked car while Lorraine and her friend hurried away.

"Yes you will." he shouted after her. "It´s you and me, Lorraine. It´s meant to be. I´m going to marry you someday, Lorraine. Someday you´ll be my wife!"

That shouting asked too much from him as it seemed. He lost his grip and fell back to the ground. Marty spun around to Jessie.

"Gotta go." he whispered and ran to Biff´s car, without another word. When he jumped into the back seat, Jessie gasped.

After Biff finally managed it to get back to his car and drove of, Marty peeked out one last time and smirking he showed her a thumb up.

Jessie had covered her mouth again and giggled under her hand.


	10. It's about Time

**It´s About Time**

Marty climbed out of the car. He was still shaking. Biff really drove badly with this leg. Several times he´d thought they would lose the street altogether. It was almost a miracle that Biff didn´t cause an accident already.

Now Biff was gone and Marty glanced out of the dirty glass of the garage door. As soon as he was sure Biff wasn´t there anymore, he pushed to open the door. It swung out a little but that was it. He tried again but the result was the same. The damn thing was locked. Dammit.

Desperately he looked around. There were some small windows but they were blocked with iron fence. Someone really had to be scared of burglars. No chance for him to get out.

He took his walkie-talkie.

"Doc." he called. "Doc, come in, Doc."

"Marty." Doc answered. "What´s the report?"

"Biff´s gone." he told him. "I´m locked in Biff´s garage. You must come with the DeLorean. Get me the hell out of here. The address is 1809 Mason Street."

"I can´t take the DeLorean out at daylight." Doc responded. "But don´t worry. As long as you stay near Biff´s car everything will be all right. I´ll come over there as soon as I can."

With that he switched off and was gone. Marty just couldn´t believe it.

"Yo, Doc, wait a minute." he shouted, not knowing that outside somebody heard him. "Doc? Hey, Doc. Doc!" But he got no answer. Frustrated he slid the antenna back. "Perfect." he cursed. Perhaps it was not as funny as he thought, to be a secret agent.

He was about to sit down – after all it seemed that he had to wait for a while – when he heard a tabbing sound outside. It did not come from the door. It was on the back wall, as if someone was sneaking around the garage. Carefully he snuck to one of the windows and listened, carefully. Suddenly a head appeared in the window. Just a silhouette against the sunlight. Until it started to speak.

"Marty?" a by now familiar voice asked. "Are you in here?"

"Jessie?" Marty just couldn´t believe it. He climbed up a box to have a better look at her. It was really her. She sat in a tree right in front of the window. "What are you doing here?"

"What are _you_ doing there?" she asked right back and for a moment he was lack of words.

"That´s … difficult to explain."

"Is it a part of your secret mission?"

Marty tilted his head. "You could say that." he shifted on the box. "Hey! Could you do me a favor? Go around the garage to the door and see if you can open it for me."

"Okay." she said and climbed down the tree.

"Be careful." Marty called after her. "Don´t let Biff see you."

When she was gone he jumped down from the box and went back to the door. Outside he could hear her footsteps. She stopped in front of the door halted for a moment. And then she just ran away again. The speed with which she was back at the window, startled even Marty.

"Whats the matter?" he asked, when he was back on the box.

"There´s a lock on the door." she told him.

"Damn." Marty cursed. "You don´t know how to pick locks by any chance, do you?" he asked hopeless. Jessie only frowned at him. "Didn´t expect that." he admitted. God dammit. "How did you even get here so fast?" he asked her. "You were in town last time I saw you."

"I bought me a scooter." she told him with a wide smile. "Like the one you drove yesterday."

Marty looked down and saw a wooden scooter leaning against the tree. The same type like the one he´d borrowed from the boy in town. Marty couldn´t help. He smiled. Unbelievable how fast such a little one was adapting sometimes.

"I heard you call Doc before." she said, changing the subject again.

"Yeah." he said surprised.

"Do you know him, too?" she asked.

"Why, Doc, you mean … Doc Brown? Is it that what you mean?"

"I know him."

He found himself grinning. "Of course you do."

"Is he coming back soon?" she wanted to know.

Marty remembered the safe house, T had brought him and Doc to, after the attack of the T-1000. But of course he couldn´t tell Jessie about that.

"Soon." he said instead. "He´s coming back soon. Uhm, listen. You shouldn´t stay here. It could be dangerous for you. You better go home. You don´t want Biff or his Grandma to see you."

"No." she agreed.

"Well, then you better go now."

"What about you?" she asked.

"Don´t worry about me. I´ll get out of here."

"Sure?"

"Trust me." Marty said with his most convincing smile.

And even though she wasn´t happy about it, she obeyed with a tiny: "Okay."

She climbed down from the tree and left with a last wave. Marty returned the wave. Then she was gone. He hoped.

**...**

Doc cursed under his breath. It had taken him way too long to organize this bike and the disguise, and by now it was already turning dark. And finding this damn address hadn´t been the easiest thing either. But then at last he saw a house matching Marty´s description. The only thing that didn´t match was the garage. It wasn´t locked like Marty´d said. And Marty wasn´t there either.

"Marty!" he called for him, but no one answered. Where was that kid?

"He´s gone with Biff." an unexpected voice made him cry out in fear. When he turned around he almost believed to dream.

"Jessie?"

The little one smiled, happily and threw her arms around his legs. "I knew you´d be back!" she started jumping in joy, with her arms clamped around his knees.

"I knew it."

Her happy jumping made him almost lose his halt on the bike, so he made her stop. The bike slipped out of his hands anyway and dropped to the ground. Little Jessie skipped back, hiding her hands behind her back, guiltily.

"Sorry."

"It´s all right, honey." he assured her and regarding the child before him now – someone he had seen as an old woman once – he couldn´t help but chuckled. "That´s how I know you." he remarked and the kid smiled again.

And all the sudden Doc remembered why he was here.

"Jessie." he went down to his knees. "Did you just say something about Biff?"

The girl nodded, readily. "Marty was spying on him. It was a secret mission. I kept an eye on the perimeter while he was trapped in the garage."

"Aha."

"And then they drove away again. You just missed them. They left just when you came."

Doc´s head flew aside, to glance down the road, but he only saw a beige car drive by – didn´t he own one of those once in his life? – and there was no sign of Marty or Biff.

"Do you know where they went?" he asked but rebuked himself a moment later. Of course she didn´t. How would she know?

"They go to the dance." Jessie told him proudly. "Biff looked like a real jempelman. But that´s just a disguise.

Doc found himself laughing. "You´re very smart, Jessie." he agreed with her judgment. "But it is really late and you shouldn´t be out here by yourself." he got up. "Come with me, I´ll bring you home."

"Shouldn´t you help Marty?" the girl asked, following on his hand. "He´s on a secret …"

And that was when the man suddenly appeared from out of nowhere, his steel blue eyes staring at Doc just as cold and merciless as he remembered them. He didn´t even have the time to gasp in shock when he was already lifted off his feet. The T-1000 held up his arm, and it transformed into a long glistening knife.

Jessie screamed.

The T-1000 flinched unnoticeable and frowning looked down on himself. Doc followed his gaze, only to find Jessie, kicking the lethal cyborg´s leg with her tiny feet. The T-1000 moved his leg effortlessly, and Jessie squeaked, flying to the pavement. After that distraction was removed the T-1000 was ready to eliminate his target. He wound up, ready to strike, and Doc tensed expecting the pain.

A shot rang out through the night and the knife-arm exploded into a dozen silver drops. The T-1000 frowned, irritated, but only until he heard the engine of a motorcycle closing in. Another shot hit him in the back and Doc got dropped to the ground.

He didn´t wait to see what would happen, but crawled over to cradle Jessie, protectively in his arms. Behind him he could hear the howling motorcycle, and then yet another shot. And another. The next thing he knew, was that someone grabbed him from behind, and lifted him off the ground.

He screamed, clinging to Jessie like she was the only blade of grass in a raging river. And then he was the one who was cradled, between two strong arms in a leader jacket. In the corner of his eyes he saw the T-1000 get back up and a shotgun that was aiming over his head. He quickly covered Jessie´s ears, before the shot rang out – way too loud. The girl squeaked again, and clung to him in fear.

A moment later the motorcycle drove off, leaving the murderous Terminator behind.

**...**

That was so not good. Marty hurried to get out of Biff´s car. He was at the school and he shouldn´t be at the school. It was a miracle that they had even made it to the school. This guy was crazy driving like that. Each time he changed the gear, Marty had believed to buy the farm. They had just about missed a god damn truck, for Christ´s sake. Future Biff was lucky to have lost only a leg!

Dammit!

But that was exactly the point, wasn´t it? Biff had gotten away with a lost leg. Someone else hadn´t been so lucky. Miles Dyson and his family. Marty wondered where they were by now.

Wherever they were now. He had the bad feeling he knew where they´d be as soon as Biff decided to drive away from here, back home.

He was about to follow Biff, when something made him halt. What? What was he even trying to do? He didn´t have to follow Biff. He knew what he would do. And he had absolutely no business interfering with that. No sir, not at all. If he had learned anything from Doc then that he should stay away from past events. Especially his own past.

But what he really needed to do was make sure Biff wouldn´t drive home tonight. And that meant he had some business with his car.

Of course, that was it. All it would take was some messing with the wheels and everything would be okay. Biff would have to catch a ride with someone else, and hopefully no one would get hurt anymore. Or maybe he should steal his car altogether? Just to make sure Biff wouldn´t cause any accidents at all until his leg was better.

Yeah, that´s what he´d do. He knew how to hot-wire the car, it was easy especially with an old model like this. He was just about to get in, climbing over the door, when somebody shouted, over the parking lot.

"Hey, who´s that guy at Biff´s car?"

Marty flinched, and lost his balance. He fell and miraculously landed right in two pairs of not gentle arms.

"Hey, that´s this bug, Calvin Kline." one of the guys announced.

"Seems he needs a lesson in good behavior." the other one agreed.

And before he even knew what happened, Marty found himself dragged behind, away from Biff´s car.

**...**

"You said you´d stay behind at the clock tower." T rebuked him when he stopped at the curbside, just outside the school´s parking lot.

Doc was still shaking, but by now it was from anger, at T for bringing them here, at himself for letting this happen, at everything that had gone wrong since they got here. In his arms Jessie was very calm. Her big eyes looked about curious as always. And god, he envied her for this youthful and fearless attitude.

He struggled to get off the bike.

"What happened?" T wanted to know. "Did something change the plan?"

"Nothing changed the plan." Doc put down Jessie. "I´m still at the clock tower."

T only looked at him, no change in his face. But somehow Doc could tell that he was confused.

"I am not the Doc Brown from your time." he explained to him and remembered Jessie just in this moment. She looked very confused, but also very interested. It was not a good sign that she hadn´t started to ask half a dozen questions already.

Doc inched a little closer to T, trying to speak quiet. "You uhm. You must carry on with _your_ mission." he told him. "And I´ll take care of mine. Okay?"

T was still not moving. He only looked.

"If you are the Doctor Brown from the future …" he ignored Doc´s angry gestures, trying to keep him from speaking out loud in front of the kid. "Something must have interfered with my mission." the Terminator decided. "It´s the only logical conclusion."

"No it is not. There´s nothing wrong with your mission, as long as you just return to it now." he made a gesture, inviting T to simply walk away from them. "Really. Thanks a lot for your help, but I can handle things alone from here."

"Negative. My mission is to protect you."

"You can´t protect me very good, if my past self gets killed while you´re not at your post!" Doc shouted, losing his patience. T didn´t respond. "The T-1000 will be here soon, and he will be after Marty." he informed this stubborn machine, and beside him Jessie gasped. "I´m ordering you to accomplish your mission, and to protect _him_. Just like you did it the first time around."

The Terminator was still not responding. "Are you sure?" the then asked and Doc exhaled.

"Yes, I´m sure. And now go, before it´s too late."

"Yeah, please." Jessie agreed. "Before it´s too late."

And this time, thanks god, the machine with the mind of a five year old, turned away and headed for the school without another objection.

**...**

Marty struggled, with everything he had, but against three guys, laughing and pulling him in three different directions, he had no chance.

"Let´s see what Biff thinks about you." one of them laughed directly into his face. "He´s not far, just wait."

Marty knew he wasn´t far. But dammit, if they busied Biff with him now, Biff might actually be late for his meeting with George and Lorraine. God, please, he had to get out of here.

"Stop." a deep voice said, as if it had heard his plead, and the three guys halted.

Marty caught a brief glance over his shoulder, and there he was. T. The one and only.

"What do you want, grandpa?" one of the guys dared, but instead of giving an answer T simply pulled out a gun.

Marty was dropped instantly, and the three guys ran. A hand was held out for him, and Marty took it, instinctively.

"You abandoned your mission." T mentioned after he helped him up.

"What? No. No, I …" Marty halted, realizing his mistake. "Uhm, I mean, no. No, I´m still on it."

T stepped closer, looking at him with this unmoving expression, and for a moment Marty felt naked under this stare.

"You wear different clothes." T observed, giving him yet another once over. "And your tissue is several days older than it was before. You´re the Martin McFly from the future."

Marty was speechless. Was that bad? He just didn´t know.

"What´s all this about?" T wanted to know, and he actually sounded like someone who´d had enough.

"Listen." Marty began. "I really don´t know if it is a good idea I told you. You see … Doc always says it´s not good to … to interfere with past events. So I probably do too much by talking to you now."

T simply nodded. "Doctor Brown instructed me to protect you." he told him, and it took Marty approximately three seconds to realize what he´d just heard. Doc! He was here!

"All right." he said, thinking fast. "And you did. But you know … you will have a lot more to do in about … ten minutes from now. On the other side of the building, over there." he pointed and T followed his finger. "Because the T-1000 will be here soon, and he´s going to kill me. So do me a favor and protect me over there, okay? Okay?"

He padded the Terminator´s shoulder, and rushed away from him, quickly.

God, he only hoped he hadn´t messed up everything already.


	11. Unhealthy Reunion

**Unhealthy Reunion**

This was wrong. He shouldn´t be here at the school, looking for Marty – and trouble. He should be bringing Jessie home, out of harm´s way. She mustn´t get hurt. So much depended on her also, in the future, and with that in his and Marty´s past. Every minute she stayed here was a risk. If anything should happen to her, he´d never forgive himself.

"Doc, look." the little one yelled, pointing over the parking lot, and before he even knew what had happened, she was gone, running towards a black car.

"That´s Biff´s car." she cried, so proud that she´d spotted it first. "Marty must be somewhere near."

"Jessie." Doc finally caught up with her, and lifted her up, before she could run away again. "Honey, you really shouldn´t run around here like this."

"Why not?"

"It´s not safe here."

"Why not?"

"I … really can´t tell you."

The girl just looked at him, disappointed. "Why not?"

Doc groaned. "You wouldn´t understand. And please don´t ask me why not, I really don´t have an answer to that."

Again she looked at him, so disappointed. "You always have an answer." she pointed out. "To everything."

"Oh, I wish I had, Jessie." he sighed, shaking his head. "But I don´t. Not this time, honey."

For a moment she was silent, only looking at him, so asking. And he could feel it coming, long before she opened her mouth at last, not able to help herself any longer.

"Why not?"

Doc closed his eyes, grinding his teeth, only for a moment, before he started chuckling. He reached up, to pad her cheek. "Never mind, honey. It´s all right. You´ll understand in time."

She didn´t answer anymore, just accepted his sentiment, and he heaved her up a little more, placing her on his hip. "Now, come on." he said. "Let´s go find a payphone. I´ll give your parents a call so they can come here and pick you up. And then I have to find Marty."

"I can help you find him." she offered.

"You belong home and to bed." Doc objected. "Now quiet. No more words."

And she obeyed, probably really too tired by now. Doc didn´t care what the reason was. He was just glad the discussion was over. Debating with a six year old was harder than discussing with every grown up woman. Not that he had too much experience in this regard.

He headed for the building. Somewhere in there had to be a phone. And if he needed to find the office and ask politely to be allowed to use the phone … while secretly hoping that neither Marty of T or the T-1000 would cross his path. Great Scott what a mess. When oh when had his carefully constructed plan lost its integrity? This whole situation was a disaster.

"Look!" Jessie shook his shoulder, and from out of nowhere Doc heard footsteps, approaching fast.

He turned around, and finally there he was.

"Marty!"

The boy stopped, searching the parking lot with his eyes.

"We´re over here, Marty!"

Their eyes met.

"Doc!"

"Hey, Marty!" Jessie was wide awake again.

"Doc, I …" Marty frowned at the kid, startled. "I … I was about to sabotage Biff´s car." he told him. "Why did you bring Jessie?"

"We came here on a motorcycle." Jessie told him, instantly, smiling brightly.

"I didn´t plan to bring her." Doc corrected, annoyed, and put the girl down. "T left me no choice. We were attacked and I couldn´t leave her there."

"Attacked?" Marty needed a moment to understand. "By that Terminator thing?"

"Exactly."

"Oh, that is heavy, Doc. They´re both here, right now."

"I´m well aware of that, Marty."

"What do we do now?"

Doc huffed. "What do we do." he repeated. "We finish our mission, of course. We sabotage Biff´s car just like you said, we make sure Miles Dyson and his family won´t get hurt and we leave this place to bring Jessie home."

"Right. Okay. Sounds good."

Only that they never got the chance to actually act on those words. An awful crashing noise disrupted the silence of the parking lot, and when they looked around, they saw T landing on the pavement, surrounded by debris and a cloud of white dust. The T-1000 stepped out of the building right after him – and he was holding T´s gun.

"Marty!" Doc shouted, inevitably drawing the attention of the killer-robot. "Take Jessie and run. Run!"

Jessie didn´t make a single sound when he scooped her up. "What about you, Doc?"

"Don´t ask. Run!"

And of course Marty ran. Behind him the shooting started, almost instantly, and just as instantly did he cradle the curly head of the kid, covering her little body with his own, just in case any bullet should find its way to them.

What he couldn´t know was that most of those bullets were aimed and shot at T, who shielded Doc the same way Marty tried to shield Jessie. Only that he did not walk away from the other cyborg but towards it – until he could grab him.

Their struggle was the first thing Marty saw, after he and Jessie reached the rooftop. Again T got thrown around, and smashed into a wall, never letting go of his enemy. Eventually the T-1000 lost his patience and raised an arm, swiftly transforming it into a huge knife. Marty saw it glisten and quickly turned Jessie´s head away, so she wouldn´t see.

But _he_ saw it. And it didn´t help that he knew T was not feeling any pain. He still winced when the knife chopped off his arm, as if it was nothing but a piece of e-waste. T was twitching, spastic, as if he was feeling pain after all, and Marty just couldn´t stand it any longer. He looked away, only to spot Doc, sneaking behind the line of parked cars.

"What´s he doing?" Jessie asked.

And as if her question had sparked it, Marty suddenly knew the answer. "He´s trying to finish the mission. He´s trying to sabotage Biff´s car."

"Why?"

Marty urged the girl down, sitting down with her behind the parapet. He was trying to think.

"Listen, Jessie." he started over. "You stay here, all right? I need to go down there and help him."

"I wanna help too."

"You help me much more when you stay here and … keep your eyes open. All right?"

The little one lowered her eyes, sulking, but nodded her okay. Marty smiled at her, padding her head. "Good girl. You´re my Lieutenant now." he peeked over the parapet. "So keep your eyes open and when you see someth …" It was in that moment that he saw the T-1000 aiming the gun at Doc again. And Doc was leaning into Biff´s car, completely unaware.

"DOC!" he shouted. "Watch out!"

Down in the parking lot, Doc swirled around, and saw the evil Terminator just in time to flinch into action and jump aside before the bullets perforated Biff´s car. He ran like four steps, until he reached the next car. There he cowered down and shielded his head with his arms. Not enough to protect him from the blast, when one of the bullets ripped open Biff´s tank, sending the car up into a huge fireball.

Thanks God T was faster than the flames, and much more fireproof than Doc. He held the shivering scientist until the fire retrieved.

Marty cheered and before him Jessie instantly began clapping, applauding T along with him. He hadn´t even noticed that she´d looked too. Quickly he urged her down again.

"I wanna see." she protested.

"It´s too …" `dangerous´ he wanted to say, but the events down in the parking lot simply left him speechless. T and Doc were running, and behind them, the line of parked cars got blown up, one by one, the two of them always only one step ahead.

Marty was unable to take his eyes off, and completely unaware of little Jessie watching just like he did. Until she exclaimed an impressed: "WOW!"

At this his instinct told him, to urge her down again. Only he couldn´t. His eyes were frozen on the scene before him.

The T-1000 was still shooting, and soon Doc and T would run out of cover. It was a miracle that no flying fragment of those exploding cars had hit the Doc just yet. T was taking all of that _for_ him. From what Marty could see, half his face was burned or blasted off. The metallic skull beneath was glistening in the firelight. Great Scott!

"Why is he doing this?" Jessie cried, when the T-1000 threw away the empty gun and ran towards his target, ready to finish him off. And, oh dear, how was Marty supposed to answer THAT?

The T-1000 was met halfway by a determined T and both robots smashed the pavement with their impact. Behind them Doc jumped up, and just ran, back in the other direction, past the burning cars – the matter with Biff´s accident was solved Marty figured.

"Marty!" Doc´s voice croaked from the walkie talkie on Marty´s belt. He almost dropped it.

"Yeah. Yeah! I´m here, Doc. What do you want me to do?"

"What I want you to do?" Doc shrieked. "I want you to get the hell out of there. Pronto."

"Sure. Good idea."

"Is Jessie with you?"

"Yeah. Sure. Don´t worry, she´s here …" he glanced down to where he´d seen her last, at the parapet right before him. But there was no Jessie anymore.

For a moment, his heart skipped a beat. But then he spotted her, on the other side of the roof, on her toes to peek over the parapet there. He instantly hurried to her, holding her in place, to make sure she wouldn´t wander off again.

"It´s all right, Doc, I´ve got her here." he assured the Doc.

"Good. When you´re sure the T-1000 is gone, get down there, and meet me at the gate on the other side of the perimeter. Our work here is done."

"Right. We´ll be there."

"Marty look." Jessie pointed over the parking lot on the other side of the building. "This guy there looks just like you."

Marty looked, uncertain for a moment. But then he recognized Doc´s beige car, idly standing there, where he had parked it that night of the dance. His dad was there and so was Lorraine, and a very much knocked out Biff. His own other self stood at the corner, watching how George helped up his mother, to lead her away, back to the dance. Wow, that was heavy.

"Why´s he looking like you, Marty?" the girl in his arms asked, looking up at him with big asking eyes and Marty could only chuckle.

"Well, you know. They say everyone has a twin somewhere on this earth."

His gaze got drawn back to the other side. Amazing that no one in the front had heard anything, he mused, just as he watched the T-1000 approach a T that was clearly losing the fight. His big friend was on the ground, crawling to reach his gun. And he was slow. Way too slow to stop the T-1000 from picking up an exhaust pipe from one of the destroyed cars, and stab him in the back with it. Marty winced, and so did T. The mighty Terminator tensed, one last time, before his hand fell down, boneless. Dead. Marty couldn´t believe it.

The T-1000 reached down, touching the metallic skull, only for a second, before he straightened again, rubbing his fingers together, as if to test and figure out what he had on his fingers. A moment later his own shape melted, and reformed itself, into a shape, Marty recalled from after his gig. The T-1000 took on the form of T´s metallic skeleton. The only thing that wasn´t quite according to what he remembered was the direction this guy was heading now. He walked away from T and the parking lot. But not towards the gym. He was in the process of leaving the campus.

Marty hesitated. Something was wrong. This was not how it should be, was it? From the other side, he could hear music, muffled, coming from within the gym. Earth Angel. And the song was almost over. T was lying on the ground, impaled by this exhaust pipe. And it didn´t look as if he´d get back up any time soon. The T-1000 walked steadily away from the gym. This wasn´t good.

"Doc." Marty cried into his walkie talkie. "Doc, come in, please. Doc."

"Yes, Marty, I hear you. What is it?"

"Doc, I´m afraid we´ve got a problem."

"And what´s that?"

"Remember the dance? Where my parents kissed, for the first time?"

"Of course."

"I´m there now. I mean … my other self. I´m on the stage playing the song." he gulped, forcing himself to focus and not to get lost in too much detail. "After I was done, I got jumped by the T-1000. T saved me and I ran."

"And?"

"I´m looking at T right now. He´s pretty much dead right now. And the T-1000 is walking away from the school. I don´t think he intents to come back here."

"Great Scott. We must have changed the events of that night, by running into them."

"That´s what I thought too."

"Marty this could be a disaster. Your past self won´t be interrupted by the Terminators and the T-1000 will not be kept from meeting _my_ past self at the clock tower. He might get there too soon, and with T not being there to stop him, he might even succeed to kill me. You´ve got to stop him."

"How?"

"Lead him back to school. Where he´s supposed to be."

"But … if I do that _my_ past self is gonna die. T can´t save me anymore. He´s dead."

"He´s a robot, Marty. He can´t die."

"Yeah? Maybe you should look at him, the way I do. He looks _very_ dead to _me_."

Before him, Jessie glanced up at him, eyes wet with tears, her lip quivering, and when he lay a hand on her shoulder, she threw her arms around his legs, letting the tears fall shamelessly. God, he knew how she felt.

"Marty, calm down. I´ll come back and take care of T. You hurry up and lure that other robot back to where he has to be. We need to make sure the time line won´t be disturbed."

"Okay, but you better hurry, Doc." Marty turned his head, and from the gym he could hear the first tunes of Johnny Be Good, played by his own hands. "I´m on my way." he finished and switched off the walkie talkie, going to his knees to look at the girl.

"Jessie. You need to listen to me, very carefully."


	12. Correcting Mistakes

**Correcting Mistakes**

It was impossible. The things Jessie saw could simply not be. A man, stabbed to death by something as big as this piece from a car. And there wasn´t even blood. Shouldn´t there be any blood?

Jessie had once learned, that whenever a person got hurt, there would be blood. And this man had lost an arm, and half of his face. And now he was dead … she still didn´t dare to look at him for longer than a second. The sight of this unmoving body, with the long metal thing standing out from his back, simply terrified her. How could any of this happen? This wasn´t right. A man musn´t do that to another. But this man had … and he´d also tried to hurt Doc and Marty.

When Marty had shouted out, pretending to call Doc, to gain the attention of this man, that was now disguised as a silver robot, the man had instantly turned around, and followed after him. To try and hurt him again, Jessie just knew that. But Marty was fast, right? He would run away from this man before he could catch him, right? Right? Marty would be okay. Please, somebody had to tell her, that Marty would not end up like this poor man in the parking lot.

Jessie glimpsed over at him, yet again, against her better judgment, and the sight just broke her heart. He was dead. He was dead, and the man who´d done that was after Marty now. He wanted to do the same thing to him. Why?

Jessie started to cry.

Suddenly there were footsteps. Someone came running. And Jessie gasped. Was he coming back? Was he coming to hurt _her_ now? After he´d hurt Marty? When she saw the figure rushing towards the dead man in the parking lot, Jessie cried out in fear, but only for a moment. When the figure flinched at her cry, looking around for her, she finally recognized him. And the recognition transformed the shape of the evil man she´d seen first, into the familiar and well loved form of Doc. Her friend.

"Jessie!" he cried out. "Jessie, just stay where you are. I´m with you in a minute."

Had Doc been in disguise, Jessie wondered. He must have been. How else could she have thought he was this evil man? In her young head it was impossible for Jessie to understand that her mind, clouded by fear and shock, had simply tricked her eyes. It would take several more years for her to look back on that night without being scared of the memory, and understand what had really happened in that parking lot.

Right now she couldn´t possibly understand anything. Later on she would wonder if anything she saw had been real at all. Or if she maybe only imagined things. Or dreamed them. Because what she saw was too fantastic and unreal even to a six-year-old like her. Because even with her six years she knew that when a man was dead, he didn´t get back up. Her grandmother hadn´t gotten back up when she had died. And her mother had cried for a long time after that. That´s how Jessie knew, that when someone was dead, he´d stay dead. Not even Doc could change that.

But when he now leaned over this man in the parking lot, and grabbed this metal pipe that stood out from his back, he pulled, grunting and panting, as if he could still do anything to help him. Was that possible? Could Doc do something like that? Could he bring someone back that was already dead? He seemed to be doing just that.

Jessie watched, unable to look away now, how he pulled the long piece out of the man´s back, and threw it away. Jessie heard the hollow sound the pipe made, when it hit the asphalt. Later in her life she would listen up every time something made a similar sound, and wonder why it caused her arms to break out in goosebumps.

On the ground the dead man twitched. Once. Twice. And eventually he began moving, pushing himself up – to Jessie it looked as if he was doing what her dad called push-ups – and rise, to stand tall before Doc. His head was still twitching, and even from that distance, Jessie could see that his eyes – well, the one that was still an eye and not a mechanical red dot – were in the distance, as if he was unsure what was going on around him. Was that the gaze of a man that had been brought back to life? To Jessie it would be just that. For years it would be that. Until she´d finally understand what it had really been – a machine trying to compute and process its database after a reset.

It would take sixteen years for Jessie to finally remember this night and the sight of T´s face, to have the necessary lightbulb moment. She´d be in her dorm at the M.I.T. in the bathroom, around three a.m. after a night out with her friends. It would be the sight of her own face in the mirror, blurry from too much wine, that would make her remember that sight.

But that was still many years ahead, in a future neither her nor Doc nor T would even think about right now. The only thing this little girl was thinking right in this moment, was that she was scared and that Doc would protect her, from whatever danger that was still out there. So she did the only thing she could do. She ran, out of her hiding place, and threw herself into his arms.

When he lifted her up, rubbing her back comfortingly, she felt better. Yes, yes, this was real. He was real. It didn´t matter if anything of what she´d seen before had been a dream. It wasn´t important, even if all of this had been a dream. But his arms were real, and his warmth and his voice, soothing her and telling her that everything was all right.

The only problem was, she knew it wasn´t.

"The bad man has gone after Marty." she told him, whimpering against his neck. "He´s gonna hurt him."

"No, Jessie, he won´t." Doc assured her. "T´s gonna protect him." And with that he looked up at the man that was not dead any longer. "Right?"

Jessie glanced at the man too. He looked scary with his face half gone. But she looked at him anyway. Because Doc wasn´t afraid of him, so she figured he was a friend. He´d protected Doc earlier. Of course he was a friend. Only he looked so hard. So unfriendly.

"My mission is to protect _you_." he spoke, his voice strangely hollow, as if it came from within a machine.

"And you will." Doc replied. "Later. But right now, you have to help Marty or this evil Terminator will kill him."

"Negative." the man replied. "It´s a priority to get _you_ to a saver location."

"You …" Doc began but stopped short when Jessie cried out in her despair.

"Please." she wailed, making both of them look at her, startled. "Please, protect Marty. He´s my friend. Don´t let this guy hurt him, please."

The man with only half a face turned to her, and Jessie hugged Doc even closer, scared he might shout at her, for interrupting. But the man didn´t shout. He only looked, and strangely there was something in his eyes now – the one that still looked like an eye – that was almost gentle. As if he felt pity for her.

The tall man leaned down a little to look her straight in the eye. His huge hand touched her cheek, so light, only with two fingers, as if to wipe the tears away. And for a moment Jessie forgot that he had only half a face. In this moment all she saw was this one eye, looking directly at her. And she felt as if she knew this man. Like a friend she only couldn´t remember.

"He will be protected." the man told her. "I promise." And after what felt like an eternity to her, he straightened and just walked away.

**...**

Jessie never saw him again after this. But she never forgot his face. He had kept his promise. Later, when they met Marty again, he told them T had shown up just in time. As if they had scheduled it. And even though Jessie didn´t understand what that was supposed to mean, she could tell that Doc and Marty were happy about the way things had worked out.

Something that had gone wrong had been corrected, making a certain newspaper article disappear. It now spoke of a strange accident that had happened at the school during the dance. Someone unknown to the police had blown up some cars in the parking lot and later on threatened to shoot lots of people in the gym. Like through a miracle no one got hurt they wrote.

For many years Jessie would be the only one who knew that Doc and Marty had been the unsung heroes of that night. But she never said a word. Not to her parents – they had cried and hugged her almost too tight when Doc and Marty had brought her home, telling them she had been hiding in Doc´s car when he´d driven out of town – not to any of her friends at school and not even to Doc. Because it was a secret – that´s what they told her anyway – and secrets had to be kept, no matter how hard it was.

And Jessie did. For over fifty years she wouldn´t speak about that night. Not a soul would know. And to the world none of it had ever happened. In time even Jessie would forget what she had seen. She would forget the chase, the explosions, and the sight of the dead man in the parking lot. How she had cried and feared for her life and that of her friends.

But the important things would stay with her. Like Marty who had made her laugh and cry and bite her nails in excitement. Like Doc who had protected and comforted her. And this man, who had looked her in the eyes, gentle for the very first time, and promised her to protect her friend … Marty.

It wasn´t easy for her to live with all of this. So confused and unsure what she had really seen that night. To grow up without Marty, knowing that once upon a time she´d known a boy who could have been her brother, but never returned until she was thirty-seven and teaching at the M.I.T. A boy whose memory made her want to become a soldier.

Just as much as memories of Doc made her want to become a scientist. Memories that would come back to her, in sudden clarity, on a day the world would later refer to as Judgment Day. Clear enough to make her understand at last, what she was meant to do, once a man named John Connor would decide to send an assassin back in time, to take the life of the man who invented time travel.

Back in 1955. Where it all began …

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><p><strong>I added an Author´s Note if you´re interested in some background infos about the story. If not, I won´t blame you.<strong>

**In any case you can leave me a finishing review. **

**And thanks for reading.**


	13. Author's Note

**Author´s Notes**

Hello, dear friends. This is your author speaking, in case you haven´t guessed. I decided to add a little note at the end of this story, first of course, to apologize yet again, for the very long hiatus you had to suffer, and second … because I think this is the main reason why we´re here on this website. To write and learn from other writers how to improve.

Now I don´t say that I´m much of a teacher, who could tell others how to do a better job. But maybe I can give you the one or the other idea, just by telling you about my process. So if you care, be my guest and listen a little while to my rambling. If you don´t I won´t blame you either way. Not everyone wants to know how a story came about and what this idiot of an author was thinking.

So here we go. I of course have to start off – again – with the hiatus I took. Let me assure you it was not a bad will of mine. I stopped writing when I got to the part where they´d go back to the school, say to the events from story one, because I wasn´t sure how to wrap this up. I knew I wanted to show what we hadn´t seen last time – the fight between T and the T-1000. I had this genius idea of showing how T lost his arm and ended up in this bad shape.

The only problem was I had no idea how. I simply had no f-ing idea how he could lose his arm. Remember in the movie his arm got stuck in a machinery. Well … my mind was kinda stuck with that and I couldn´t figure out a way to copy that for my story. What´s in a school that could cause such a damage? Nothing, right?

I still don´t believe it took me like 3 years – 3 goddamn years – to figure out that the T-1000 is able to make huge knifes out of his arms and he can just chop it off. Seriously, don´t even try to imagine how often I facepalmed since this lightbulb moment. Sometimes it´s so simple …

But I still think it was good that it took me so long to finish the story. Because frankly, when I went back, reading over what I had written back then … damn it was awful. I don´t know what I did back then but it surely wasn´t WRITING. Amazing that anyone read and even liked it back then. I don´t know how I could ever thank these amazingly patient readers. THANK YOU.

At the end of this year 2014, I finally found the time to read and work over this story again. It´s still not perfect but at least it feels more like a story I would enjoy reading myself, than it did before. Seriously what was I doing back then?

Anyway. Back to the point.

Just like the first story, this one was inspired by several fanmade trailers on youtube. Especially one was very appealing to me. It´s only one minute long but it had a great feeling of darkness and danger and suspense. Have a look if you like. It´s called "Back to the future 4 teaser trailer (2010)"

It features Marty and Doc in the future after Judgment Day and it was obviously the inspiration for this particular part in the story. For the things that came after their escape I had to get a little creative.

Since there hadn´t been any old Biff stealing an almanac, I needed another reason why history had been screwed up. So I fed from what I had in story number one. In combination with a screwed up time line from the Terminator series, I figured I could use Miles Dyson for this story. Since I had planned to write this sequel long before I was done with the first story, I had placed little Miles in Goldie´s café as an Easter egg. But as far as I remember that was the only thing I prepared in the first story. Anything else that fitted together in the sequel came about by itself. No planning from my side. I guess time really has a way of working on its own.

I´m not sure how plausible my scenario was. Miles Dyson being Marty´s neighbor from all the people in the world seems a little far fetched. I gave Marty this line where he speaks out this exact doubt for no other reason than to address this little issue. Sometimes admitting how ridiculous a plot is, frees you from having to be ashamed, if you´d try to sell if to others as totally plausible.

"Of course that works. What? No. Plotholes? Don´t know what that is. It makes absolute sense. I know what I´m doing."

You get my meaning ...

I just recalled I placed another Easter egg after all. And that was J.J. telling Doc in the future that she used to know Marty. Because I had planned to let the little girl bump into Marty of course. Why? Because I could.

Let me say it was a delight to write this little kid. I never knew how much fun it could be to get into the head of a six year old. But Jessie was a treat I can tell you. She became her own personality in such a short time, it was scary. Especially the way she was so present these last few chapters. Even when I was writing from Doc´s or Marty´s POV she was always there. Her reactions and her behavior, at all times, drew their attention, and made them aware of her presence.

As I said it was amazing. And this last chapter … I didn´t plan to write it from her perspective. I initially planned to start with Doc and maybe continue with Marty, how he lures the T-1000 back to the dance, maybe hiding and getting away while things unravel. I also wanted to try and give T a little moment of character, just to give him some credit for the person that can be hidden underneath this machine.

But in the end it was Jessie who took over and when I was done writing her POV of events, I suddenly realized that I was done with the story. That this bit I had written was already a perfect wrap up, and all I still needed was a finishing paragraph. Crazy, ain´t it? Maybe that´s the reason why we should write our stuff at two in the morning. Because you switch to another mode, and your brain stays out of the creative process, knowing that it doesn´t belong there. Sometimes all you should do is write and don´t stop until your fingers stop moving. Trust the story, it knows what´s best.

So despite the fact that it took 3 to 4 years for this story to get finished, I think in the end it was worth it. Because I believe that back then, when I initially wrote this story, I wouldn´t have been able to bring it full circle in the end, the way it happened now. We had explosions, we had Marty and Jessie bonding, we had T responding to the little girl (she was his future activator after all and he was programmed to follow her orders) thus he got his little moment where he could show his hidden human side. A perfect wrap up.

And we got an ending for a story that allows us a little glimpse into the future. The future of this little girl, who was in the end, the only reason why the story could happen the way it happened in the first place. If it would have been a movie, I could imagine the last shot being one of her face, maybe with a voice over of J.J. remembering these past events.

Maybe.

So anyway, someone once asked me if I plan to write a Trilogy and I would like to answer this. I don´t. After this last chapter I feel a tiny itch to write something more, especially for T. But it´s not enough for another story. So before I promise anything I can´t keep, let´s wait until Terminator Genesys comes out. Maybe after watching this, I might feel boosted again, to write something new. But I can´t promise that.

In any case I feel as if these two stories came to a full and round ending. So if there won´t be any more, I won´t leave another project unfinished. I never liked that I had abandoned this one for so long. But as I said: I tend to trust the story. And this story just wanted to be finished the right way. Even if it took some time.

I hope you can forgive me for that. And if you read through this essay until now, I have hope that you did. So let me end with saying thank you one last time. It was a great experience to remember the past one last time. Thanks for being with me that long.

And again, thanks for reading.

P.S. Feel free to read the two stories again, if you are curious to see how I changed it. I hope the pacing is a little better now. I cut out a lot of scenes that felt too long, mostly scenes I had only copied right from the movie. Seemed right back then, but damn, I wish I had listened to the person who told me it wasn´t necessary. Because it really wasn´t … Well, we never stop learning.

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><p><strong>Feel free to share your thoughts with me one last time.<br>**


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